


You Smell Like Trash

by BoxWineConfessions



Series: You smell like trash [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Ends with some polydins, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, For the sake of inducing magic, Galra Keith (Voltron), Keith is 18, Kissing, Like diet angst in comparison to what I usually write, Mild Angst, Pidge is 16, Slow Burn, brief mentions of self harm, lots of sass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-26 03:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7558720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxWineConfessions/pseuds/BoxWineConfessions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Garrison,” Keith hisses he turns his head in every direction trying to identify something, but can’t. “You’re a lot of trouble you know that.” He takes his knife from his belt and holds it in one hand. “Just follow my lead. You were kidnapped. You know, vulnerable smart shrimp.” </p><p>She feels the knife at her throat. Yeah. Like that explains it. </p><p>Or: Pidge meets a badly dressed smelly guy out in the desert. When he's not trying to get her killed, they actually make an okay team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Smart. Vulnerable. Shrimp.

**Author's Note:**

> Check tags: Aging up Pidge to 16 and Keith is 18 in this fic. If that is not your thing, please pass on this fic.

When she was little she hated silence. Silence meant that Dad was (still) at work. Silence meant that Matt was out with friends or at extra curriculars. Silence also meant that mom was probably lying down in the dark somewhere with a headache, so even though she was ultimately free to do whatever she wanted, she had to tiptoe around like she was walking on eggshells.

This never boded well. Dad always made jokes that they should’ve named her Grace. He told the joke  a million times over the course of his life, but each time he laughs like he’d just thought of it.

Now that she’s graduated flight school with flying (mostly flying, did they really need a physical portion on the entrance exam?) colors, she loves silence more than anything else. It’s so rare when she’s always around other people. Even in the still of the night when she has the privacy curtain closed around her bunk there’s noise. Lance and Hunk talk in their sleep. One night swear to god, they both got going and started talking to each other.

“BBQ spare ribs AND mashed sweet potatoes….”

“Hey, hey hey cut it out. I’m trying to score.”

“I don’t care if it’s extra. A side of greens too.”

“Don’t mind him ladies he’s an idiot.”

That particular incident happened on a night when she actually wanted to sleep.

Out here though, save for the occasional rustling of vulture feathers, it’s quiet.  Tonight there’s a wind going, stronger than a breeze but not quite a full blown gust where there sand gets in her eyes constantly and she has to call it a night early. The breeze is long enough to send her hair flying every which direction and she has to keep an eye on her paper notes, but it isn’t so still that the still of it all drives her crazy.

And it’s just her luck that whoever is out there has an earful to say tonight.

“Blue. Red. Blue.” Something she can’t quite understand, and “Druid intuition.”

It sounds like garbage but it all gets copied in her notebook dutifully.

 _Ping_. The sound of _something_ hitting a boulder about thirty feet away catches her attention. Something in the back of her mind tells her it’s not a rat or a vulture, and it needs to be investigated. She sets the frequency to record and gets up to check it out.

It is neither a bird, or a rat, or even a tumbleweed. It’s a cylindrical metal container with rivets on either side. In the middle there is a small indentation. It’s making strange gurgling noises as she approaches. “What is that, a homemade pipe bomb?” she thinks to herself.

Before she can properly react, there’s a sound of _pop_ _fizzle_ and then finally a sharp _bang_ like when the guard gives a 21 gun salute. She’s sat through thousands of them at this point, but he never gets used to the sound that goes in one ear and out the other leaving her shocked.

She’s thrown a few feet into the side of the ravine, and hits her head.

For a moment, or maybe quite a few moments the world goes blank.

She’s not exactly sure how long she was out. When she comes to, she does a quick visual check. Both hands, both feet. Fingers and toes can be accounted for later. When she rolls over and looks back to where the equipment is, she sees a man rifling through her things.

For a moment Pidge thinks she’s been caught by Garrison MP. Piecing together her own equipment using stolen parts, leaving base without authorization, conducting unauthorized field work, and now being found at the site of a bomb no less than two miles away from the garrison base? She’s pretty sure there’s enough there for a court martial.

Another second of analysis reveals that she hasn’t been.  This guy has a sloppy haircut, ripped jeans, and some kind of biker jacket that would get him laughed off base even if he was wasn't on duty. No way this guy wasn't Garrison anything, let alone top brass.

“Hey!” Pidge growls through her teeth. She tries to rock herself up off the ground and onto her feet, but there’s a sharp pain in her head and she flops over, bent in half in pain. “Get away from that.” She tries to sound threatening, but it comes out pained and halfhearted.

She makes a second attempt to get up again. This time more carefully, making sure to not move to quickly.

The man rifling through her rucksack barely takes note of her getting up. He moves onto the laptop and tries to read the streams of data pouring in from the alien transmission.

She grits her teeth and runs over to him, ignoring the stinging in her leg and the pounding in her head. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She lunges at him without thinking and takes him to the ground.

Before she can even start wailing on him with tightly balled fists that barely passed hand to hand combat in flight school he’s got them flipped over, dagger pointed at her throat.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“I don’t have anything worth stealing. Leave my things alone.”

“Oh man, you’re bleeding. Shit.” Just as soon as he wrested her back to the ground, she feels the weight shift off of her. He’s running over to his own rucksack and taking out a small box.

She’d try to grab her things and run, but she doesn’t think she’d make it very far. Her head is throbbing. Since he’s pointed it out, she looks down to her calf. The stinging turned out to be something a little more substantial. She’s not sure where the wound exactly was, because the entirety of her lower leg was covered in blood.

“God you have fucked all of this up,” he says in an exasperated tone.

Yes this whole thing is totally fucked up. She was just doing her nightly thing when all of a sudden-wait. _She’s_ fucked it up?

“That bomb was supposed to scare you away, not wreck your leg,” he says like that’s a more than adequate explanation. “If you’d stayed up here, and it detonated back there you’d be fine. Scared but fine.”

Pidge bores holes into his skull with a deadlock stare.

“It’s so hard to actually get anything accomplished when you’re out here every  night doing your homework or whatever.”

“I assure you it’s more than ‘doing my homework or whatever.” Pidge bites out.

“Well whatever it is it’s getting in my way. Here hold this,” he hands her a roll of bandages and then takes the canteen attached to his hip off his belt. He pours water over Pidge’s wounded leg. “You’re lucky this is just a cut. I don’t think there’s anything inside.”

“People planting BOMBS out here is getting in my way.”

Keith pours some antiseptic from the kit over the open wound. He’s careful to not use too much. This guy’s got access to Garrison medical supplies. No telling when he’s going to get his hand on another first aid kit. “Gimme that bandage.”

He doesn’t even wait for her to respond before he’s plucking it out of her hand. “I can’t find any more detail on the mission. I _have_ to be out here. The desert is big, just go somewhere else.”

Keith notes the prick of tears in the corner of his eyes. “Mission?” No, it really couldn’t be….But then again this guy looks like that _other_ guy that was on Shiro’s ship. “Kerberos?”

Pidge eyes him up and down while he’s wrapping his calf in gauze.

The stranger’s eyes light up. “That’s what all this is about. I knew I recognized some similarities in your field notes.”

Pidge kicks the stranger away with the ball of her foot. She finishes wrapping the rest of the bandage herself, then realizes she doesn’t have anything to fasten it with.

“Need one of these?” The stranger smirks and hold a fastener in his palm.

She swipes at it but he’s too fast, and closes his palm. “What do you know about Kerberos?”

“I think months of secretly gathering intel at the risk of being court martialed is worth more than a bandage pin,” she quips. Sure this guy could just as easy switch the flip back over and pull the dagger out, but he's pissed her off to no end. She wasn’t going to roll over because he happened to be armed.

“Okay tell me what you know about Kerberos,” He tosses the pin. “And I’ll give you a ride back to the Garrison.”

A thick silence grows between them.

“It’s at least two miles. Gonna be hard on that leg.”

“Fine, whatever. I’ll tell you what I know.”

She does, and it’s almost the complete truth. Voltron, Red, Blue, and Druid intuition. There isn’t much more other than a list of coordinates where their leads turned out to be false. A whole lot of nothing. And, a whole lot of a guy named Zarkon getting pissed. It’s not like he can really _do_ anything with the intel. She doubts anyone’s tech can compete with hers. Even the Garrison seems lost by comparison.

It’s not pumping her ego. She wanted to put more faith in the Garrison, but they’re just so lacking.

After she finishes, he helps her to his bike, and he drops her off one fourth of a mile away from the barracks.

“I’m picking you up here again tomorrow night. 9:00. If you’re late I’ll be mad.”

* * *

 

She decided as soon as she hoisted her leg off the bike she wasn’t going to show.

Pidge didn’t even hit the desert that night. Her leg was giving her hell, in the ache and sting kind of way. Not in the scary gangrene kind of way. She’d already bullied one of her acquaintances in nursing school to look at it. She was good enough at everything except for chemistry, so Pidge took care of it in exchange for moments like this. This was not the first time she’d seriously messed something up alone out in the desert, but it was definitely the worst.

 Pidge didn’t even want to hit the desert that night. Lance was on night patrol until 1:30, so that meant she only had to share the room with Hunk. It meant there was a distinct possibility of getting ten hours of sleep tonight if she went to dinner now, crammed in her homework, and hit the pillow immediately at 8:00.

The next night it was her turn for night patrol. Not that she minded. Most cadets were assigned night patrol once every two weeks. Pidge gladly picked up a few extra shifts in a month for several reasons. First, she was rarely asleep by 2 or 3 am anyway, regardless of the 6 AM wakeup. Next, it kept suspicion off her. Gunderson was a quiet guy with very few friends, and lots of time to pick up extra tasks. Finally, it did afford her extras. Visits to the nursing students without a report being filed, Hunk making her a weighted belt she could smoothly wear under her clothes to meet weight requirement.

So by the time she is able to hit the desert three nights later, after the initial incident, she nearly shrieked when she saw him on his speeder exactly 1/4 mile away from base. “I told you I was coming the next night.”

“And I never agreed to that,” She spat back.

“We need each other’s intel,” his gloved hands twist on the accelerators with annoyance.

“You never gave me anything useful. Just blew me up, extorted me, and stole my field book I might add.” She meets his tense brown stare and doesn’t blink.

“I would’ve had it back to you two nights ago if you hadn’t flaked.” He tosses the field book back at her.

She catches it against her chest. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” She spits as she tucks her handbook into the side pocket on her bag.

“Come on, it’ll be….” He furrow his brow as if he’s trying to think of something else to say. “The best date you’ve ever been on.”

“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly.”

“I don’t even really know what it means. I just think you’re supposed to say stuff like that to make girls get all flustered,” He retorts.

“I’m a dude,” she insists. What the ever loving fuck was this guy’s issue.

“Whatever. You’re gonna be so upset when you miss this.”

“Miss what?” Pidge knows she’s being baited. But, if this weirdo isn’t trying to murder her, and might actually have a lead on something she’d be so mad at herself if she missed it.

She did take a spare moment to make sure she was armed today. Garrison cadet issue extendable close combat baton. Nothing that can really compete with a bomb or a dagger…She could clobber the shit out of him if he somehow couldn’t reach for his knife. “Fine,” she breathes through her nose and pinches her glasses. She’s even more pissed off now hearing her words of compliance. “You have to tell me your name though, so I at least know the name of the guy whose gonna exploit my insecurities and murder me in the desert.”

“It’s Keith.”

She nods.

“Now who are you? Other than, nosy Garrison clone?”

“You can call me Pidge,” she says as she hikes her leg up over the bike.

Keith scoots forward. “Fake name too. I like it.” He starts the bike and it lurches forward with a boom and a jump. They take off due north, towards the dunes.

They ride for a few minutes Pidge’s hands are firmly grasping the far edges of the seat. It’s better than holding onto him and being any closer than they have to be. The roar of the engine cuts off everything going on in her head. She can’t hold a single thought in when it’s combined with the scent of burned oil. She wishes she’d brought something with her, a scarf or something she could pull up over her mouth and nose like Keith’s got. Sand gets into her teeth and her nose and the whole thing is miserable.

“You should probably hold on to something other than the seat.” He yells as they approach the dunes. “Gets messy round here.”

She refuses, because although he didn’t specify, it means “hold onto me.” There are no cargo racks or anything else to hold onto on the speeder.

“Don’t cry when you hurt yourself again,”

As if almost on cue, a few minutes later, the clouds of sand clear from in front of them, and Keith’s confronted with a choice. Hit the large boulder in their current path or make a jagged turn at almost 70 degrees. Of course he makes the latter.

Pidge goes flying and Keith isn’t doing much better. The front of the speeder ends up buried in sand, and he’s thrown halfway over the handle bars so that his forehead almost touches sand. Quickly, he rights himself, revs the engine, and throws the bike into reverse without so much as a cursory, “Are you okay?”

“I would love to not get hurt at least once, when I’m around you,” Pidge growls between clenched teeth. “Or better yet, not be around you.”

“I tried to tell you,” Keith replies in an uninterested tone as he watches the sand shake off the front end of the speeder. Suddenly, enough of the gray brown sand has been thrown off and it goes in reverse. “Get back on.”

For the rest of the ride Pidge’s hands are almost clawing into Keith’s shoulders. It’s like she’s some kind of desperate koala hanging onto the world’s worst eucalyptus tree. She makes some kind of dissonance induced peace with it in her mind. Shoulder are safe. Shoulders aren’t as bad as flinging her arms around his waist.

After about twenty more minutes of exploring the dunes, Keith kills the engine without another word. He gets off the bike and gets into his rucksack. He removes a compass from his bag , and turns from the speeder’s due north direction. They walk a few paces northeast, and then he announces. “It’s here. Might’ve gotten covered by the wind.

Both of them scramble to their hands and knees and start clearing away sand at the location he’d gestured to.

Handful after handful of grainy dry sand, and then Pidge’s fingers hit something hard. “Is this it?”

“Must be.” And they dig around it faster revealing a piece of pitch black stone. Pidge would estimate that it’s almost a meter tall and two meters wide. It’s covered in strange writing. They don’t look like symbols, but they also do not look exactly like phonetic language. From a cursory glance she can’t detect any pattern like repetition in the writing. The writing glows purple blue in the moonless sky of a new lunar cycle.

“A lot happens out here during the day when you’re in class,” he says as they lock eyes.  “What do you think it is?” Keith asks.

“I don’t know the writing is unlike any language I’ve ever seen before. And it looks so smooth. Like it’s not a piece of some larger thing.” Pidge runs her hands along the script. It makes her fingers tingle. It feels like licking a battery only in her finger tips.

“I thought that too.”

“But I don’t see any seams or cuts indicating something is inside. Can we move it somewhere? It’s not safe out here.”

“Not with your little arms. I already tried this afternoon.”

Before Pidge can eke out a barbed response, they’re blinded by spotlights. She can hear rough masculine voices yell, “Stop, hands up.”

“Garrison,” Keith hisses he turns his head in every direction trying to identify something, but can’t. “You’re a lot of trouble you know that.” He takes his knife from his belt and holds it in one hand. “Just follow my lead. You were kidnapped. You know, vulnerable smart shrimp.”

She feels the knife at her throat. Yeah. Like that explains it.

“I’m going to kill him if you’re not careful,” he barks at the garrison officers. He drags her to her knees and keeps the knife pointed there the entire time.

The yelling from beyond the spotlights stop for a moment.

“That’s what I thought,” he says in a low voice that’s somewhere between a whisper and normal talking.

He takes another device off his belt and throws it downward. It whips up sand from the ground causing it to pour into Pidge’s mouth and nose. In the near distance he can hear the sound of the bike revving up then riding away.

Smart. Vulnerable. Shrimp. The three dumbest words ever uttered in sequence have become some kid of mantra that Pidge can’t let go of. “Look I don’t know how to tell you this any other way. I was kidnapped by that guy,” He couldn’t have taken her with him. That would’ve been even more stupid. Still she didn’t think that highly of the guy to take the bureaucratic portion of the fallout.

“You were found at 22:30. Campus is closed at 22:00.”

“Well we were pretty far away from the Garrison campus. It takes awhile to get out there,”  He says coolly.

“So exactly what happened Gunderson.” The officer, Sargent Pearson, hates Pidge. He constantly reminds her that she barely passed physical requirements, and that her team has failed three of the last four flight simulations.  

“I was walking out to the rec area.” There were a few basketball courts on the edge of the barracks for downtime. “From my dorm Block N, so I wasn’t using the designated path. It was shorter to walk along the back side. Then, next thing you know there’s a hand over my mouth and the crazy guy is grabbing me.”

Pearson looks him up and down a few times. Pidge holds his gaze, and he’s unable to find any immediate holes in the story.

“So just why were you out there?”

“If I knew I probably could’ve avoided being abducted at knife point. He was crazy, talking about an obelisk out there, and some guy named Voltron. I was scared to death.” Smart. Vulnerable. Shrimp.

After another 45 minute of interrogation, Admiral Rader barges in and tells Pearson he’s badgered the poor boy enough. The interrogation ends with little consequence to Pidge.

But not before Pearson barks over his shoulder, “Gunderson, you’re expected at first simulation at 07:00 tomorrow. And, you’re on night duty for the rest of the week.

“Yes Sir,” he replies weakly.


	2. Coal Ash, Spoiled Milk, and Other Fun Things

When her week of night duty passes, leaving the Garrison in the shadows, an hour or so before lights out feels like a breath of fresh air after being contained in the men’s locker room for a week. Tonight she’s got all her stuff in tow, but her leg is still a little sore, so it still takes longer than it should to hike the quarter mile out to where Keith picked her up last time. It’s an unassuming place marked only by a cactus that’s slowly rotting out in the sun. During the day it looks pathetic. The left arm of the cactus is grows more mottled and squishy each day.  

When she check her wristwatch its 21:25. She’s early, so there’s no reason to be nervous.

Later it’s 21:31. Still no reason to get nervous. He’s weird, and passionate about…something. He’ll show.

21:45. Damnit. She could be halfway out to the bluff by now on foot. Somewhere between cursing Keith’s name to filth and heaving the rucksack over her shoulder (It’s jam packed tonight. She expected a ride) she hears the roar of the bike in the distance. “Finally.”

“You’re late.” She quips when he finally pulls up.

“Night watch sucks doesn’t it?” He replies as she’s halfway on the bike. He’s wearing the exact same clothing he’s had on the past two times they’ve met. Pidge has an excuse. She likes the green version of the Garrison issue tunic. It hides everything. She has five different identical tunics in her dresser. What’s his excuse?

She’s struggling with her rucksack and he’s doing absolutely nothing to help her.

“How did you know I was on night watch?”

He kicks the bike into gear and gams the throttle. In an instant they’re speeding due north once more. “I’ve been watching you.” He takes a sharp turn right, and Pidge is forced to change her grip so that her arms are linked around his shoulders in some kind of weird, pseudo wrestling move.

“That is so creepy. Like, do you even know how weird, and messed up and gross that even is?” She screams over the sound of the bike’s engine. “Like what is even your problem? Just take me back or murder me okay?”

He does neither and keeps going on into the inky black horizon.

“I keep tabs on a lot of things going on at the Garrison okay?” He spits as soon as he kills the motor. They’re out at the bluff. A long tract of sandstone that dips off nicely into a huge crevice. From the sliver of the moon he can only see the sand a few feet in front of them. It’s not even enough to see the drop-off point, but he’s been out here enough to know it’s out there. “You are in no way special. Other than the fact that maybe I can use you.”

“Then why did you help me? You could’ve just taken my stuff, or let me deal with the flack. Week or two in the brig and you could get back to using me.”

He doesn’t respond immediately. Instead he strides over to the edge of the moonlight’s reach and starts removing things from his own bag.  “You gonna set up your thing or what?” He asks curtly over his shoulder.

“Yeah-on it.” Pidge climbs down from the bike and starts taking all the equipment out. “Here, make yourself useful,” she unburdens one bag from her shoulder. “Set up the telescope. I’ll get the computer.”

Miraculously, he sets it up accurately and without complaint. Maybe she’s underestimated this guy.

Or maybe she’s still suffering a mild concussion from the accident last week.

After awhile they’re both spread out on an army issue olive green blanket with more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Keith even indulges them and makes a campfire to go alongside the telescope and small series of laptops running at full speed.

Pidge would never admit it, but it’s nice. The desert is hot and unforgiving, and equally cool and unpleasant sometimes at night.

“Here,” he pulls a small jar out of his bag. “Put this on your wound. It will reduce the chance of scarring.”

Pidge accepts the jar, hikes up her shorts, and peels back the bandage. Upon opening the jar her face screws up and she wants to gag. “Gross. This smells like death.”

“It’s made of coal-tar and other fun things,” he deadpans back. “Works though.”

Pidge smears some of the thick black paste onto the wound and then smashes the adhesive bandage back into place.

“Hey,” Keith says with a tinge of worry in his voice. “You have to give that back to me when it’s healed.”

“Don’t know when you’re going to get more yummy coal-ash?” Pidge teases.

“Exactly,” he says in a curt tone.

“You’re the guy that dropped out of the Garrison,” she says after a long silence. Not the good kind that lets her settle her thoughts and think of solutions to long, drawn out problems. The sucky kind that eats away at her ability to read a situation and interpret social cues in favor of ending the silence.

Then there’s more silence. She shouldn’t have said anything, thought long and hard about not saying anything at all. But there was a big part of her that was curious. She didn’t know him from before, couldn’t even recognize him, but the name clicked. Kogane. Top of the class one day, gone the next. Despite the fact that the Garrison pretended to pride themselves on excellence and rigor, she got away with near murder on a daily basis. He must’ve actually pulled the trigger.

He’s fished a notebook out of somewhere and has commandeered her astrolabe. He adjusts the telescope accordingly.

“So are they talking tonight or what?”

“Yes and no,” she admits looking up at him over her screen. “This Sendak jerk is taking up the channel. Talking about how he’s made a ton of money on an over-under bet on “the champion.” Won’t shut up about it.”

Keith humphs from his spot at the telescope.

“What do you think is going on out there?” Pidge asks in a hushed tone.

Keith straightens his back from the bent position over the telescope and backs away a few paces. “I mean, I think there’s something here and they want it. There’s this cave. Maybe if you stop causing me more trouble than your worth I’ll take you out there.”

Pidge’s jaw drop. Cave? What else is out there? He’s so limited by going on foot and being confined to the hours between 21:00 and 06:00. It’s annoying. More annoying than having a knife pulled on her twice by a guy with a bad haircut.

“I can’t explain it. The energy is incredible there. There’s something going on there, and I can’t explain it. If I could I don’t think I’d feel like I was wasting my time out here every night.”

“Feels like touching the obelisk?”

“Yeah,” he moves over and sits near her on the blanket. His eyes dart uneasily from one screen to the next.

He doesn’t understand the code, Pidge realizes. It’s getting him worked up.

“This one is the radio transmission. Still Sendak. Still won’t shut up about gambling.” She gestures to the monitor immediately to her center. Then she points the right. “This is a monitor of all the stuff in and around Earth’s orbit. Obviously it doesn’t do much good considering the scale I think we’re working on.” Finally his finger darts back across the two monitors over to a third. “That’s taking whatever data I see fit and cramming into a machine learning algorithm. It’s the least exciting.”

Keith nods.

“Any news from the Garrison on the obelisk?”

Pidge stops typing at screen number three for a moment. It needs adjusting, but nothing that can’t be fixed later. The machine is set to record, and the analysis can be rerun accordingly. “I know the approximate location of its containment. It’s in the 27th sector with top brass of course. Too risky to try to get at now, but if they transport it in a few days I’m on it.”

Keith opens his mouth as if to speak, but she stops him before he can even start. She raises her arm and pulls the too long tunic from over her hand. “Look at this.”

She thrusts her hand into Keith’s face. The index finger on her right hand, the one where she’d traced the writing yesterday has become a muddled purple black color. Like she hit it with a hammer or dropped something heavy on it. “The skin is all dead and sloughing around it too look.”

Indeed there is a lot of gray peeling skin coming off on the digit.

Keith takes her hand in between both of his and holds it up to his eyes. “Wow that is really cool,” he admits. “And gross.”

“You’re telling me.” Pidge admits.

“Do you think it….Zapped the life out of it?” he says in almost a whisper as if he’s ashamed to say it. It is pretty far fetched. Some kind of concentrated poison might be more realistic.

“Yeah,” Pidge breaks away from Keith’s smothering gaze. “I kind of do.”

“Why aren’t my hands messed up? I touched it too.”

Pidge has to stifle a laugh by biting her lip. Is that a tinge of, jealousy? She’s not getting anything extra out of it other than the ability to gross Lance out with even less effort than before. It’s not some huge breakthrough.

“Why are you so interested in Kerberos?” It’s a risky question. It’s something that might make him change moods immediately. But she’d like to know. Maybe, he’d like to know what her motive was too. She’d say more, she just wasn’t going to be the first to say it.

“I’d like to think that Takeshi Shirogane was..” He knits his eyebrows. He does this a lot, tries to find the right word and ultimately gets upset at himself for coming up short. “My friend,” he says after a long pregnant pause.

Pidge’s stomach drops. Takeshi Shirogane as the pilot on Dad and Matt’s ship. Maybe he also knows they’re not reporting the whole story. Maybe they could help each other if they’re working toward a common goal.

“I’m….” she pauses. She doesn’t owe Keith anything. Certainly not this vulnerability. He probably doesn’t even care. But she feels like it could melt some of the ice between them if she’s going to keep climbing on the back of his bike whenever she gets the chance. “I’m related to Matt and Sam Holt. On the mission,” She adds.

“That must be difficult…To lose something you’re accustomed to.” He takes in a deep breath like he wants to say more, but stops short. He’s back to staring at the transmission screen intently. “What’s going on here?” He points to a line of text as it crawls up the screen constantly being displaced by new transmissions.

“Quintessence.”

“Quint-essance.” The word rolls off of his word in broken ugly syllables and he botches the enunciation.

“It means something like…energy you know? They need a lot of it for Voltron. I don’t know if they need a lot of it to find it, or to run it, but it comes up a lot”

“You didn’t tell me that before.”

“Hard to remember all the pertinent details when you’re being held at knifepoint,” She quips back. “They’re talking about how much they have, how much they need.” She rifles through her rucksack for a moment and frowns. “Speaking of energy, do you have anything to eat out here?” Since being punished for getting “kidnapped” he hasn’t had time to go out and get any peanut butter flavored energy bars or trail mix. Garrison food, aside from fresh fruit, was the worst.

“No.” Keith replies in a tone that makes him sound like he’s offended. “You’re the one whose getting fed by the Garrison.

Another silence blossoms between them. Okay, so bring all the equipment, and the snacks, and bring Garrison intel that was more useful than “I knew you were on night watch”. What exactly did Keith contribute to a mess of a partnership?

 “Anything else?”

“Lots of numbers. I think they’re star systems but I’m not sure.”

“Can you make this so I can read it?”

“Yeah, sure.” Her face flushes a bit. She could’ve done this two hours ago when they’d started all this. She toggles the screen and the output is rendered in characters he can read.

Now it’s his turn. He grabs a large book with leather binding and mildewed pages from his bag. It smells like basement combined with spoiled milk.

He opens the book and it looks like a star map. There are two twin circles on the page dotted with smaller circles within. There’s a ton of writing that she can’t understand in a key identifying each dot. Aimlessly he gets a red felt tipped pen from his bag and starts scrolling through the list of numbers within the output.

“These aren’t just numbers, they’re star systems.” He flips the pages back and fourth a few times making big red X’s as he scrolls through. Pidge can’t help but notice there are already a few star systems with X’s drawn through them.

Pidge can do little more other than stare dumbfounded. Each circle must be a galaxy. Each dot, not a star, but a star system. He’s seen maps of the known universe before, but never in a text like this, so big and so old. It’s bizarre.

After a good fifteen minutes he’s scratched off every system on the list. By the time the channel grows silent again, he’s flipped through maybe half of the book in the process. “Can you do something with this? It’s hard to make sense of everything when it’s pinned to the book.”

Pidge fishes her phone out of her pocket and snaps pictures of each page. “I think I can make a decent enough model with this.” She finishes and fiddles with her phone for a few more minutes. Then she sits it down, screen side up between them.

 The screen flickers, and a map of the selected galaxies are rendered in holographic form between them. The places mentioned specifically are highlighted in red, mirroring Keith’s marker. It’s not a perfect module, Pidge notes. There are some theoretical issues.  The scale is pretty messed up. You can especially tell when you look at the distance between the first and second systems in the model. But, it’s slightly more malleable than an old smelly book.  

Keith runs his fingers through the hologram with an open mouth. “Looks like a route. See, start at TX-138, then onto C-009.” He withdraws his hand from the hologram. 

He didn’t look like the kind of guy who would have the names of obscure galaxies. She’s not used to knife pulling guys being the same kind of guys who know astronomy really well.

Pidge adjusts her glasses up on her nose. She needs an eyeglass repair kit like crazy. Over a hundred screw drivers in the collection (Lance counted once when he was super bored), but not an eyeglass kit in the lot. “Yeah, but what of?”

“That’s a damn good question.” He takes the book into his lap one more and flips to the front. He scans a few of the pages. His finger drags along the page as he reads.

Again it looks like nothing Pidge has ever seen before. “What language is that?” he asks. “Where did you get it?”

“That’s classified,” he quips back.

“So is that,” she replies looking at the bike. “Garrison officer issue. Somehow I don’t think you made it that far.”

Keith snaps the book closed in his lap with a start. “It’s late. We should get going.”

Pidge looks at his wristwatch. It is getting on near three am. The fire has long since burned out, and their radio drama has been reduced to gambling odds on an upcoming fight. Boring.

They pack up their belongings, and this time, it’s Keith who hauls Pidge’s burgeoning rucksack over his shoulder.

Like a train making it into the stop, he kills the engine at the rotten cactus. He even helps her get the bag off the bike.

“So, tomorrow?” Pidge asks.

“You’ve got an emergency drill tomorrow at 2:00 AM,” he replies.

“Oh shit you’re right.” Although again, she doesn’t want to know how he knows that. Emergency drills are just that. Unannounced late night simulations designed to mimic aircraft landing and recovery in extreme situations. She always needs to know when they are so she’s on base. “And I have a thing the next day. I’ll contact you when I can pick you up again.”

Pidge swallows a lump in his throat. Contact? That was crossing a line that hadn’t been crossed before. “Nothing too weird.”

He throws his weight to one side kick starting the bike. There is no response.

“Seriously Keith. We need mystery between us.”

The emergency drill comes and goes with (little) incident. Hunk was late to formation and busted for raiding the pantry.

The next day he’s able to locate an eyeglass repair kit from a guy named Hayato down the hall. She also discovers, upon closer inspection of her things, that Keith has lifted the astrolabe this time. She can’t even feign anger. It’s rarely used in favor of the more precise computers.

The next day she has no watch duty and no classes after 1 pm. So she settles in on his bunk with her laptops spilled out around her. First thing’s first, look up those star systems Keith mentioned and improve the labeling on the hologram. The writing from the book didn’t transfer, and it’s hard to make any meaning out of a map with no key.

She types in the name of the system Keith mentioned first. “THX-138” she chirps as she types.” She watches the green load bar crawl to completion as the database is scanned.

“No result.”

“Huh, that’s not right.” She tries the scan again.

“No result.”

“Okay, it was late. I’m misremembering. Let’s try this other one.” She types “C-009” on the screen.

“No result.”

Okay, whatever. She reasons trying to ignore the tingle between her shoulders. Keith is totally full of it and has no idea what he’s talking about. Guys do it all the time. Why should he be any exception? Oh, but she’s so letting him have it the next time they see each other. “Nice try.” She murmured under her breath. “Really had me going there thinking you could read that stuff.”

The next afternoon she goes back to his room at lunch to run some numbers. Nothing major, but it’s better than being shoved to the end of a bench so she’s only got one cheek on and the other hanging off. It also will afford her thirty minutes of much cherished silence.

She almost screams when she hoists herself up onto her bunk. There, on her pillow is a note written in rough scrawl. “Lock your window in the morning.”

“For fuck’s sake Keith.”


	3. Like Getting Tased, In a Nice Kind of Way

Keith’s cryptic note aside, everything was going quite well today. Tomorrow was her day off, and she was done with everything for today. No classes and no homework that couldn’t be finished over breakfast in two days’ time. Not to mention, it was the best day of the week. Garbage day. This meant she had just enough time to book it to the nearest off base store, grab some non-perishable food that was actually edible, and then rifle through all the things that nobody else in the Garrison wanted. All before her meeting time with Keith.

Garbage day was great. She’s gotten a lot of good components for her machines there. When she can’t find what she needs, it’s easy to pull together a few pounds of scrap metal and take the train on her day off to the junkyard where she can exchange it for a couple of bucks and actually buy what she needs.

No way a cryptic note was going to bring her down. Keith was just being Keith, that is to say a weirdo with what seemed like relatively harmless intentions.

If she knew his easily antagonized nature, and even though they’d only known each other for a few weeks, she liked to think she at least knew that part of him quite well. He probably went for the window specifically after she told him not to be so creepy.

The door to the market rings upon her entrance, and the shop keeper Ms. Park waves at her. She’s so short she barely comes up past Pidge shoulder. At present the rims of her pink glasses barely come up over the top of the tall counter. Although it’s a favorite stop for many Garrison recruits, Pidge is almost certain she gives them enough of her money to at least pay the light bill.

“Buy some fruit today Pidge. Not just sugar,” Ms. Park orders.

“Fine, fine,” She replies but she’s already got a week’s worth of protein bars in her basket.

 _“You’re the one who gets fed by the Garrison.”_  She remembers his bitter words spoken across the fire. Was Keith hungry? What did he do for food, and water, and all the other necessities? “Damnit Keith,” She mumbles under her breath. Thinking about Keith during daylight hours was dangerous. It crossed another boundary. Keith was something that started existence after the sun went down and went away completely at 2:30 or 3:00 AM. Hadn’t he already crossed enough boundaries with the note today?

She tries so hard to push the thought from her mind. But he did give her the medicine for her leg…For the wound that he caused. Still, there’s hardly a scar there. She has to really look for it in the harsh fluorescent light of the showers.

She didn’t owe him anything. Not the food, and certainly not the laptop in her bag she’s cobbled together over the past week out of spare parts that have been cluttering up his desk. He really doesn’t deserve that. “Damnit Keith.” She curses again. She sets the basket on the floor and fishes her coin purse out of her pocket. Carefully, she counts the bills inside. Scant. So she moves onto the coins, first the silver and onto the lesser ones made of thin aluminum. After counting she shoves a few more bars into the basket.

As almost an afterthought she places two packages of dried apples in the basket too. “See,” she gestures into the basket when she gets to the register. “I listened this time.”

* * *

 

****

It was stupid. Like so stupid. He should just throw it into this huge pile of garbage and pretend it never happened. But she’s always riding around in the desert without anything covering her face. Or, she’s got that stupid tunic pulled up over her face which causes it to ride up too high. She probably gets burns on her stomach from the sand when she does that.

It was stupid. She’s going to hate it anyway because the only one he could reach before the shopkeeper whipped back around was one toward the front. It’s pale blue with big ugly pink roses on it. She’s not going to go for it because her masculinity is so fucking fragile.

 _“I’m a guy.”_ Sure Pidge.

It was stupid, but he doesn’t ditch the scarf alongside the rest of the garbage. It’s brand new, and he’d rather give it to someone. Not that he has anyone else to really give it to.

Thinking about Pidge was dangerous. Pidge was a tool, not someone to do favors for. Maybe he’ll bail tonight. She’s expecting him, and he just won’t show. He’ll ride out to the cave with the star map and do some brainstorming how he preferred it. Alone.

He pushes through the bin of plastic recyclables. There’s nothing much that’s good in there other than a large purple basin. Might be good for collecting rain water. They’re always cracking in the sun or from woeful underuse.

Pidge might be dangerous, but she’s useful. She has access to a lot of technology that he doesn’t. Information falls into her lap by skill. He can’t compete with that. However, he can’t shake the feeling that she’d turn him into the Garrison if anything went sour.

Even though that’s pretty stupid too because she’s had multiple opportunities at this point.

He moves onto paper recyclables. Most of the good stuff is shredded, but Garrison officers are stupid. They don’t shred duty schedules, or supply delivery times. Very useful for snooping around unnoticed. He finds a big box of these unshredded documents and throws them on the back of the bike.

“So this is why you always smell like garbage,” a voice calls from behind him. He turns around, hand on the dagger. He’s never come across another soul here before.

Big brown eyes shielded by glared lenses. Stupid big cargo shorts. Annoying scraggly brown hair. The last person he wants to see right now.

“You have a lot of room to talk,” He growls hefting another box of files onto his bike. “You don’t smell great yourself. Like body odor, only supercharged.”

“At least I-“

“What don’t root through garbage? Because you clearly are about to.”

“Take a shower every day,” She quips back.

Keith raises an eyebrow.

“Every other day,” She corrects.

“And you’re sweaty. It feels like got rained on when I get off the bike. My back is covered in your nasty sweat, and it’s like I have to peel you off of me. Not to mention the seat.”

She doesn’t say anything for awhile, and pretends that she’s lost interest. She’s busied herself in the recyclable metals. She fishes out a few large field batteries as well as a few pieces of long copper pipe. “Your breath smells like something died.”

“I didn’t see any deodorant in your room.” He navigates through a few bags of garbage that have missed their target. He walks over to where Pidge is at the metal bin and has to scale a small mountain of garbage bags to get there. Half way up he almost loses his footing and goes tumbling down the garbage mountain. It happens almost every time he goes pilfering through Garrison trash, but today he focuses every muscle in his body on not falling over. He’s not giving her any new material. “Can your toothpick arms reach that satellite dish?” He gestures to a dish approximately two feet in diameter.

“What if I wanted that?” Pidge stops pulling at the steel wire he’s desperately trying to re-spool. He’s got several yards of it threaded around his hand already.

“Then I guess your toothpick arms need to be able to reach it on their own.”

He watches with a smirk as Pidge struggles to lean far enough out to reach the dish. There’s no way her ego will let her ask for help now. She struggles, and in a few seconds her footing become uneven. She’s pushed the bags under her feet too far out, and it’s sent her over the rim of the bin and into it.

She’s lucky it’s just recyclables.

“I hate you so much,” She declares.

Keith doesn’t even give her a cursory glance.

“Even if I don’t have deodorant, at least I don’t use it as a substitute for bathing,” but it’s clear that he’s lost interest in this particular string of insults.

After a while Pidge’s pile stops growing and he stops digging. She turns to her own pile and starts cramming as much as she can back into the bleached out olive colored bag she carries everywhere she goes.

“Throw it on the bike. I have straps today. We can tie it down.”

“It’s not meeting time yet,” Pidge responds.

“We can still get out of here. I’m not going to try to convince you.”

Pidge swears as he darts toward the bike with an armful of junk.

* * *

For whatever reason, she decides to wrap her hands around his waist instead of clinging onto his shoulders. His body is firm and unyielding between her hands clasped together around his middle. She feels like a very sweaty sloth clinging to a trash tree.

As if to reiterate her point, his hair goes flying while they ride. It hits her face and blocks her glasses. It’s greasy. Like, worse than hers after a few days working on an advanced comp-sci final while being holed up in the computer lab.

He’s gross. Absolutely gross.

When they’re out past the base, almost halfway out to the bluff he stops and lets the engine idle. He pulls something from the front pocket on his jacket. “You’ll probably hate this,” he says as he hands her a scarf. It’s made of soft light linen. It won’t hold much heat out in the desert. It’s light blue with big gaudy pink roses.

Her nose crinkles in disgust. Luckily Keith’s still turned facing forward. He can’t see her disgusted affect. “It’s hideous,” she replies as she ties it over her mouth and nose.

“Good, I’m glad you find it awful,” he replies as he accelerates the bike. She swears she can almost hear something akin to a smile in his voice. It’s unsettling. It makes her stomach feel sour, maybe more so than the note on her pillow. They ride out further than they ever have before. Past the bluff, through the dunes, and to the edge of the mountain range.

Pidge has never been out here before outside of sanctioned Garrison training. Without officers barking, and something to do, they’re breathtaking. There’s something about the way the scorched red brown sand fades into the smoldering sunset that makes this barren place look beautiful.

As soon as she hops off the bag and dismounts, she pulls the scarf away from her mouth, but keeps it hanging loosely around her neck.  “Before I ask you about those systems and you piss me off,” They’re at the base of one of the numerous mountains that dapple the visible horizon. She shoves a grocery sack full of energy bars at him. “Here,” she says refusing to meet his gaze.

“I hate peanut butter,” he responds. When she looks up he’s smiling. Not smirking. Not got his mouth pinched in a weird murderous grimace that could be misconstrued for a smile. No, it’s a smile.

“Well I guess you’ll hate this too.” She pulls the laptop she’d thrown together this week out of her bag and gives it to him too.

“It’s so you have no reason to sneak into my room like that again. You can send me a text like everyone else. That’s beyond stupid Keith.”

“I told you,” his voice raises in pitch in almost a playful way. “It’s nothing personal. I have to keep tabs on the Garrison.” He cracks open the computer and runs his hand over the keyboard.

“The dorms though? That’s where you have the highest chance of getting recognized!”

“Anyway,” Keith dismisses the rant that’s bubbling below his surface. “I hate it. Thanks.”

“I figured you would.” She says with more mirth than she intended. “That’s why it has a giant battery in it so it lasts for forever. Like two days.” And despite trying so hard she can’t bite back the small smile that pinches at the corners of her mouth.

Dinner is just as gross as his greasy hair and her sweaty b.o. Peanut butter energy bars with a side of lentils cooked over a hastily thrown together campfire. They’re mushy and woefully under sesoned, but it’s somehow better than whatever it is that the Garrison tries to pass off as food.

“You really got me going for a minute.” She playfully slaps his shoulder. It catches him by surprise and he drops their spoon in the sand. It’s really his spoon, but he only has one. So they’ve had to share. Pidge is pretty sure he let her use it first because he wasn’t going to waste canteen water on rinsing it after they switched off. Gross.

“Really Pidge?” He scowls and wipes the dirtied spoon off on his pants.

“Sorry!”

“The note?” he asks once he’s deemed the spoon appropriately clean.

“No the star systems,” She replies.

He gives her a blank stare, blinking a few times as if to reiterate that he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“The fake names for those star systems. I searched them in the Garrison’s database. They don’t exist.”

“The Garrison’s database sucks,” he says with some finality as if that’s supposed to explain everything.

“I’ll agree that the Garrison could do a lot of things better. A lot of things. But I fail to see how you’re musty wanna-be Necronomicon is supposed to be better than a database that’s been updated in…Oh I don’t know this century?”

“Look,” he pushes the dinner supplies away with a start. “They’re real Pidge. They’re out there, and that’s what somebody out there calls them, even if no one here on Earth has names for them yet.” He cards his hands through his bangs in thought. Then he turns to meet her gaze. “I know you have a lot of reasons to not believe me. I can’t even explain it to you right now. But if you pick just one thing I say to believe, I hope it’s that.”

Pidge tilts her head from side to side in thought. He did seem too goal oriented to lie, even if he hadn’t exactly revealed what that goal was yet. It didn’t _help_ anything. There’s also a part of her that’s sitting on top of so much raw data without a theory to stitch it all together. It’s all so far from her comprehension it’s near impossible to draw any type of conclusion.

“Okay.” She wants this. She’s desperate for this.  For anything that might tie any of this to Matt and Dad “I believe you.” The whole conversation went 1000% better than Pidge anticipated. She expected Keith to do that thing where he gets red faced and starts limiting his responses to monosyllabic words in the world’s worst attempt to stifle his anger. None of that. She’s glad. It means she can whip out her laptop and they can talk about the other important thing she’s discovered this week.

Keith nods, gets up, and goes over to the bike, still burdened with their haul from earlier. He grabs a large orange flashlight with a black handle from his bag and flips it on. The sun is going down, and soon it will be pitch black out, save for the moonlight and stars. He strides over to her and offers her his hand. She accepts, and he pulls her up.

“Thanks,” he says. Twice in one day. Its absolutely sincere, and that makes it even stranger. “I want to show you something.” He leads her off into the craggy rocks that form the base of the mountain. She can go over the translation files with him later. “It’s not an explanation,” he warns. “Just more questions.”

His hand doesn’t come unclasped from hers, even after he helps her off the ground.

She doesn’t think she’s going to get murdered once.

“Watch your feet. These rocks are really jagged,” he warns.

“I’m fine,” she insists as her foot slips and she’s about to go headfirst into a series of jagged sandstone.

“Uh-Huh.” He says as his arm goes taut and pulls her back up. “Stop looking at the stars. Try watching where you step. It’s kind of why I brought the light.”

“They’re just so mesmerizing.”

Finally, after several more slips of Pidge’s feet, and many more displeased sighs from Keith each time, they make it to the mouth of a cave. It’s pitch black inside but from the mouth Pidge can already see several large stalactites and stalagmites. He can hear the soft drip of ground water somewhere, and its surprising considering the climate outside of the cave. “This is the cave you mentioned?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’ve proved myself useful?” She teases. Despite the increasing frequency and intensity of his groans and sighs each time she tripped he seems to be in a good mood tonight. She can’t say she feels differently or minds.

“Something like that,” he moves forward with a jerk and nearly pulls her to the ground in the process. Yeah, their hands are still locked together under Keith’s iron grip, and she’s starting to wonder if he’s somehow forgotten. Like clenching his knife is so entrenched in his muscle memory that he doesn’t realize he’s squeezing her hand til it hurts, not the dagger’s handle. “Don’t let it go to your head,” he adds.

“Trashboy finds me useful. My ego, it swells.”

They walk back a few hundred feet into the cave. Without a word, he’ll take a moment to shine the flashlight on some of the cave’s more scenic features. Large calcium deposits that look like icy chandeliers or a magnificent stone wedding cake, stalactites and stalagmites that have joined together in the middle to make something that looks like prison bars. They’re almost as distractingly beautiful as the stars in a sky without light pollution.

They reach a large barren cavern within the large cave. Keith stops and turns off the flashlight. “Just stand here for a while okay?”

Like she could do anything but unless she was going to try to drag him along with her. If she had bruises on her hand in the morning she was going to be pissed.

They stand like that for a long while in the pitch blackness. Pidge swears she’d feel like she was falling into nothing if Keith wasn’t hanging on. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been in a situation where her eyes weren’t going to adjust, just scramble for particles of light that weren’t there.

The hair on her arm stands upright, and she can feel her heartbeat quicken. It’s like she’s about to get busted for breaking the rules, but she’ done nothing wrong. That feeling comes back. The one she felt out in the desert touching that onyx colored obelisk. Like licking a battery, but this time it happens all over her body like a battery is licking her.

“What do you feel?” Keith says in all but a whisper from somewhere in the blackness. He’s close, they’re touching, but he sounds like he’s a million miles away.

She opts not to tell him that it does in fact feel like a team of batteries licking her. “Like I’ve had too much caffeine. Like I’m standing still and my heart is racing and I don’t know why.”

“I kind of know what you mean. It kind of feels like getting tased, but on a low, almost nice kind of way for me.”

And suddenly getting licked by a battery doesn’t sound so weird.   

“I want to take some readings.”

There’s silence for a moment. Pidge can only assume he’s nodding, but in the darkness it goes unseen. “Okay,” he speaks finally.”

“I need the light on.”

“Oh yeah,” Keith flips the light switch back on. Pidge takes the laptop out of her bag and begins taking energy readings with a small probe.

“Wow,” she says after a few moments.

“What is it?”

“There is mega energy here. Like we’re talking enough potential kilowatt hours to power the Garrison compound for like, a month.” He furrows his brow and points at the screen. “But like literally everything else we have some data without answers. I can’t find anything to attribute to it. No like secret underground waterfall churning out tons of energy, no natural gas pockets, no radioactive elements, there’s nothing under or above us, or on either side for that matter. I’m getting nothing.”

“How is that even possible?”

“I wish I knew Keith.”

She takes readings and samples long into the night. In addition to scanning the entirety of the cavern, as well as nearby passages so she can make a three dimensional holographic model, she also takes samples of rock, and water dripping from stalactites. She makes Keith help, having him move about the laptop so she can get as many data points of information as possible.  The data she’d wanted to tell Keith about long pushed from her mind.

By the time she’s done her wristwatch reads well past three a.m. By the time they hike back to the bike and go back to the Garrison the sun will be up.

Keith finally speaks again when they emerge from the mouth of the cave. He drops her hand (iron grip reattached for the hike out) and asks, “You don’t have anywhere to today right?”

“Right.”

“Let’s just camp out here. I’ll take you back tomorrow night.”

She doesn’t have a sleeping bag, or anything else that she might need, but she answers without second thought, “Sure.”  

 


	4. The Feeling of Pre-Barf

They’re at the kitchen sink at home. The clock proudly booms 1:45 PM, which means Mom and Dad are at work. It’s the cat clock her mother had hanging in the kitchen until at least the day she left home. It’s a black cartoon cat with a tail that swishes with each passing second. It’s eyes dart from one side to the other in tandem with the tail.

His jacket is draped over a chair at the dining room table. She’s got Keith seated in one of the barstools that typically lurk in the bar area between the kitchen and the dining room. He’s got his head bent back over the sink, and even though this is her dream…One that her brain has conjured, she’s embarrassed by the sight of Keith’s bared throat.

Her hands are running through his sudsy brown hair. There’s a bottle of Mom’s favorite (and expensive) shampoo sitting nearby on the counter. She can recall in crisp and almost perfect detail the bottle. It has a disgusting papyrus font in faux gold. The logo is a silhouette of a woman with long straight and assumedly silky hair. It’s swept into the wind and fades into flowers and flower petals.

He’s got his eyes screwed shut, like she’s going to deck him in the face and he’s just waiting for the blow.

She pushes his hair into a suds Mohawk, then suds pigtails, and laughs all the while. “It’s going to look and feel so much better.”

“It was fine before.”

She rinses it using the detachable nozzle on the far end of the sink. She can see him visibly relax as she runs her hands through his hair, making sure that all of the suds are gone. And to make this already shitty dream worse, he’s complacent and doesn’t hate it when she wraps his hair in a big fluffy white bath towel from the master bathroom.

When Pidge wakes she can feel the tight feeling of pre-barf (medically accurate term) building in her throat. Disgusting. She’s dreamed some utterly messed up things before but this is above and beyond the worst.

The sun is cocked at a nice 45 degree angle in the sky. Her wristwatch says they’ve slept til almost 9:30, which means this is the most sleep she’s gotten in one siting since last week. She’s never spent the night out in the desert, but she’s never hated that obnoxious feeling of sleeping with her mouth open more than she does now. It’s like Keith came over in the middle of the night and poured sand into her gaping mouth. Worse yet, what if spiders or something crawled into her mouth while she was passed out?  

Oh god. If she ever slept out here again she was sleeping with the scarf wrapped tight around her mouth.

She’s also in direct sunlight. They’d set up blankets to sleep on near a bluff, but in their hurry to get to sleep set them up in the opposite direction of where the shade would be. She feels like a roasted potato slathered in olive oil. If sweat were olive oil.

She rifles through Keith’s bag until she finds some deodorant. As she applies it she broods, “You’re the worst, I can feel the contamination spreading,” and so on until she puts the cap bag on and jams it down into the bag.

After a long draught from her canteen, she fishes a laptop out of her bag and gets back to where she left off last night…this morning. There has to be some kind of explanation for those readings…Plus, she has to tell Keith about developments with the obelisk.

After a few moments, she hears a cry from the spread out army blankets, “Oh, my god it’s so fucking hot,” it comes out as a wail, agonized and pathetic. She never expected that kind of sound to come from Keith who’d rather use the last of his energy to die with a smirk on his face than use it to crawl away from getting stabbed again.

Without another word she tosses the canteen at him.

“OW!”

“Sleeping beauty, get over here. I’m in the shade. I’ve wanted to tell you something since before the cave.”

He comes and sits next to her. His hair has become somehow even more disheveled during the night, and thus looks like even _more_ of a disaster. The top is sticking every which way, and the longer part is stuffed down in the collar of his shirt. At least he finally ditched the jacket.

She tosses him the bag of dried apples she’d opened earlier for breakfast. He manages to catch it without as so much opening his eyes.

“Stop it. Just stop throwing stuff at me. You’re so bad at it.” He rubs the sleep from his eyes as he complains.

Pidge, seated against a large piece of sandstone, looks at him over her glasses with one eyebrow raised. “Get it together Kagone. You’re going to want to know about this.”

“About what?” He sloppily shoves a handful of dried apples into his mouth.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She gestures toward the cave. “I got so caught up in the super cool taser cave I forgot to tell you the other news.”

Keith’s back goes straight as she speaks. “News?” He pulls to full attention opening his eyes and focusing in on Pidge.

“News on the plot device.”

He stares blankly back at her.

“The Deus ex Machina.”

Another thick stare that raises the tension between them.

“The obelisk. Stop staring at me jeeze,” She responds.

“Why would real life have a plot device Pidge?”

She clicks the laptop shut and brings forth another tablet. It’s gunmetal gray, but worn and chipped around the edges, it exposes a shiner, much more unfinished metal surface beneath. She swipes across the screen a few times absentmindedly. She hopes that Keith doesn’t notice…Or won’t point out the beads of sweat that transfer from her finger to the screen.

“Someone was nice enough to upload some very detailed stats and very high definition photos. Sure the server is classified, and sure the mainframe is harder to get into than say, a specific officer’s computer, but it’s still manageable.”

“Humility is more becoming Pidge.”

“Like you can tell me anything about being becoming.” She scoffs at him. Anyway we’ll start with the thing that’s least exciting, since we have those readings from the cave. This relatively little, stupidly dense box has a shitton of energy in it too.”

“How much?” He replies. His brows knit close together on his face and his mouth is pulled into a firm thin line.

“Uh…If my estimations were correct and whatever it is in that cave that is trying hard to look like it’s not in the cave…could power the Garrison compound for a month…This could…for half?”

“Is that even possible?”

“Nuclear energy maybe? But I didn’t see any files indicating that they know what the box is made of or what’s inside at all, indicating that the energy source _may,_ and this is a huuuge unwarranted jump to conclusions, but may be similar to whatever is in the cave.”  

“ ‘Kay,” Keith says in response. “Doesn’t mean much if-“

 “Can you just hold on a minute.” Pidge shoves at his shoulders. “No I don’t have any concrete answers. Yes it’s just more questions, but let me have this okay?” She swipes a few more times and brings up pictures of the object. “From these pictures of each side I was able to translate what it says based on the same software I use to translate the transmissions.

“So what does it say?” Keith isn’t getting irritated yet, but he is getting slightly upset because Pidge isn’t producing evidence fast enough, and his mind isn’t able to race ahead and fill in the gaps. Pidge can tell by the way he’s pulling at the straps on his gloves as they talk.

“Um, it’s still a bad translation, but I think it says something along the lines of, ‘You haven’t been forgotten, nor have you been forgiven.” She scrolls to the next photo, the other side of the obelisk.  “It’s been 9000 years.”  She switches photos once again. “Now it’s time to be of use. We know that the Limb of Voltron is near.” The next photo is of the shorter bottom of the obelisk. The text is much smaller here. Phaelpho, use this quintessence wisely.” Then she switches to the photo of the top. “Do not fail us again.”

“The only word I’m not getting here is Phaelpho,” She turns her head and says to him. Maybe it’s an error in translation, or its something like quintessence, a unique word to their language. I just haven’t had enough context clues to translate it properly-“

“It’s a name,” Keith interrupts.

“You think so?” Pidge asks over the top of the tablet which has been raised from Keith’s view and pressed up into her face.

“Um, I mean maybe.”

It’s the first time she’s heard anything quite so wavering in his voice.

The silence between them envelopes both of them for awhile. Pidge looks through the photos a few more times and pours over the energy readings from both the cave and the obelisk.

Keith busies himself with sharpening his knife on a whetstone he’s procured seemingly from thin air. The sound of _shing shing_ as it grazes the stone isn’t annoying to Pidge and it’s surprising. She loses herself in it for a moment as she combs through all the data.

“A name would make sense.”

_Shing shing._

“I wonder who Phaelpo is....” her voice trails off.

_Shing shing shing._

“9000 years is a super long time, but it seems like they have reason to believe they’re still here. I’ll start by looking at some census data from the area and-“ the sound of the knife slips off the whetstone. The sound is harsh in comparison to the constant sound of Keith sharpening it in the background.

Suddenly, Keiths bridged the space between them, knife out. He’s practically falling on top of her, the tablet crushed to her chest. His eyes are wide, yet focused. It’s that terrifying feral look that she’s seen before, but never wanted to be on the receiving end of again. More disturbingly, they’re only inches away. Their noses could touch if she had the courage to move a muscle.

She has to admit, she lets out a somewhat undignified scream.

Keith raises the knife, and strikes it the right side of her face. He pulls back and reveals to her a large tan and brown scorpion stabbed through the blade. Its legs twitch, dispelling the last of its energy. It’s not lost on her, the sight of the large bulbous brown black stinger on the end of its tail.

“Thanks,” she squeaks out.

“Yeah.” He sheathes the knife, then looks away toward the bike. “I think I should take you back to base now.”

Pidge can feel an argument rising in her throat but it dies somewhere between her tongue and seeing how upset Keith is.  She packs up all of her things scattered about the campsite with hastily, and doesn’t say a word on the ride home.

* * *

 

He’d made a critical error. He shouldn’t have even engaged. Should’ve kept dancing around her, should’ve just let the situation escalate on it’s own if it ever did. A tool to be used? That only works if you have something over the person you’re trying to use.

Yeah, he could physically overpower her with very little effort. But that’s not what the situation requires. It requires technology, intelligence, things he doesn’t have and therefore he can’t use what he can’t control. Letting her get close was a mistake. Now she’s on the cusp of too much, and no matter how he looks at it, the situation was fucked.

So, when he drops her off at the Garrison that afternoon, he drives away with the firm intention of never coming back.

Pidge was not only a Garrison linked liability, she was a distraction. He’s started thinking about her in between their meetings, and not just in the context of thinking about her intel or technology. The scarf was just a manifestation of a week and a half’s worth of tangential thoughts.

She got him thinking about his own time in the Garrison. He got a lot of shit, for just existing. Being at the top of the class, bad haircut, having a temper…Yeah provoke the guy who has a temper. Great idea. But, he could handle himself. Keith’s pretty sure he never got a day off the entire time he was involved with the Garrison because they were spent in the brig for fist fighting.

He never lost a single one though.

Pidge on the other hand. She was small, and short, and was probably the kind of “guy” who was “asking for it” in the way that people stick out, and crowd mentality turns people into monsters. Pidge couldn’t hold her own in a fist fight. Who was throwing the return punches when she got called a pussy? Who was slamming the guy who got into her face into a locker when they called her a fag? A small effeminate guy wasn’t safe in the Garrison.

Pidge was a distraction.

The time he spent thinking about her meant Shiro drifted further away. When he was thinking about her, five feet away on another blanket shivering in the crisp desert night air, it meant he wasn’t thinking of burning alive in Shiro’s arms.

When she had her arms around him on the bike, it meant he didn’t have his arms around Shiro.

When he was stealing her scarves, it meant he wasn’t figuring out what was going on in the cave and why or how it related to Kerberos. It needed to end, and so it was ending.

* * *

 

Keith didn’t come to the rotten cactus the next night. She sat near the cactus with her back to the wind for almost ninety minutes before she gave up. By that time it was too late to go out to the bluff, so she settled for the ceiling of HQ. It wasn’t as dangerous. It wasn’t as windy, but it wasn’t the same. There was interference in reception from the titanic satellite dishes out in the yard.

In the far reaches of the floodlights that light up the complex, she doesn’t stop her work every so often to look at the thumbprint shaped bruise that’s on the top of her hand. If she does she’ll get angry, because how can you fuck that up? Like he was holding onto her so she wouldn’t fall, or get hurt and he messed that up too.

He didn’t show the next night either. Pidge only waited thirty minutes this time before trekking off towards the bluffs. However, she didn’t stay at the there. She trekked about a half mile west in order to get away from the area she knew that he frequented as well.

She doesn’t miss him. He usually just stares at her working until he can find a way to make himself useful.

They get on the line and start talking about how Phaelpo has failed to make contact with the target (obelisk?) despite their energies being tied together. Phaelpo has failed them, and how other measures must be taken. The primary objective is Voltron related. The secondary objective is killing Phaelpo. When this happens, she doesn’t think about how Keith would analyze this information. She doesn’t think about how his knife slipped in his grasp upon this person’s name. She doesn’t think about how he’d use the information about the energies of Phaelpo and the obelisk being tied together to try to connect the obelisk to other landmarks or people in the area.

On the third night she doesn’t even wait for him. She just goes out to some spot close enough to the bluff to reach it by foot but far away enough to not be obvious. He doesn’t miss him, because they don’t know each other. All they ever talk about are strings of information that don’t make any sense.

They sort of told each other why they were so hell bent on finding answers and the weird pseudo intimacy of it almost threatened to ruin the whole thing.

Sendak has gotten this champion guy promoted from prize fighter to soldier. It _sounds_ a lot like a guy getting bought and sold. For the first time she actually cares about this guy millions of lightyears away that she’s never met before.

On the fourth night she doesn’t think about wrapping her arms around him on the bike. It’s just that she walked really stupidly far out past the bluff this time. It’s just that her feet hurt, and she’s gotten lazy and accustomed to the rides.

* * *

He doesn’t miss her.

He doesn’t miss the overly sweet protein bars. He doesn’t miss being drenched in sweat night after night. He doesn’t miss the projectile vomit streams of consciousness that come out of her mouth when she’s trying to make sense of something that clearly has no viable answer.

He doesn’t miss the fact that even though he can’t see a viable answer, she can usually drum up some extra piece of the puzzle through reason, or logic or cunning.

He doesn’t miss her.

He might miss her resources. The computer is great, but he’s not in a position to recharge it just anywhere. He has to sneak around outdoor outlets at the Garrison, which means he risks getting seen. By an officer or worse by her.

He might miss having up to date data while he’s still digging through garbage and plotting star maps by hand.

But he doesn’t miss her as like…a person.

* * *

On the fifth night, shit hits the fan.

Sendak has been given control of the job based on the language being used. There are still lots and lots of mentions of Phaelpo, and now blue gets mentioned alongside the lot of it. If her translation is correct either he’s coming here, or he’s sending someone here.

She’s pretty sure it’s here. She’s never wanted to be wrong more in her life, but the coordinates given match Earth’s approximate location. What it is however, she’s still not sure, and that scares her. It’s something urgent, something important, and her mind is drawing blanks on how to fill in the gaps and actually do something.

They’re gaps that Keith might actually be able to help her with. He knows something, probably a lot of things, that she doesn’t. He has some kind of grasp on the language if he’s able to read that book. Then, there is the book itself.

She runs it through her mind over and over again. So much so that when she returns to her bunk that night she barely gets any sleep. Never the less she’s propelled awake through class all day because despite whatever avenue she takes, whatever outcomes are possible, there’s not a one that isn’t amplified by Keith’s skill set. So she skips garbage day, and crams her bag full of supplies. Enough to last her the night, and all of her day off.

The desert is big. She’s going to need a ride.

She checks a list she keeps on her phone. Who in the equipment room owes her something? She scrolls for a while and taps at the screen. “There we go. Alright Jamie, I hope that computer repair was worth it, cause I’m phoning in a pretty big favor.”

She’s never been more thankful that she placed a tracking device in the computer she gave Keith last week.


	5. Emotionally Constipated

The ATV engine stalls for the fourth time since she’s left the Garrison equipment garage, and she gives it a string of curses in response. Jamie was a dead man. There had to be something else in that godforsaken garage that could’ve been checked out for 24 hours unnoticed other than the vehicle he literally had to finish welding back together before signing out to her under a false name.

After throwing her whole body weight into the kick start multiple times, the engine lamely decides to turn over. It’s nothing like the thunder of Keith’s bike, and more closely resembles the emphysema laden cough of the old men who play baccarat at the table outside Park’s general store for hours while they smoke.

The going is so slow she removes the rose patterned scarf from her face after awhile so that it can hang loosely around her neck. She doesn’t need it if nothing is getting kicked up.

She goes through the usual places: the bluff, the dunes, and finally makes it to the cave. There’s no sign of Keith anywhere, but she expected this. She expected to ride though the night and come up empty handed.

The desert was large, and if he didn’t want to be found he could easily be avoided. No fire, hide the bike behind a few narrowly compacted boulders, and he’s all but invisible.

So, she’s legitimately shocked when she sees his bike parked outside a small dwelling. It’s past the cave, nestled just before the mountain range begins on the far east side. There is a small well in the rear, and a clothesline strung from the well to the dwelling. From her spot on top of the dune, she can see shingles from the roof that are peeling back like skin scorched in the desert sun. They flap absent-mindedly in the wind like flags.  There are several large open mouthed vessels placed outside, and she realizes they must be rain water collecting vessels. It’s a smart thing to do. The humidity is abnormally high. They might actually see rain out here.

Keith actually lives somewhere. In something that is kind of like a house. Which is a very stupid thought because of course he does. There’s a very big difference between occasionally camping in the desert and living there full time.  Death by exposure was a real thing. 

She realizes a few things. First, he has to travel a very long distance to come find her. Second, this place isn’t meant to be found, even if you have access to highly detailed topographical maps and can use the process of elimination to find out where it is.

She’s also very, very unsure of how to approach. If she rides up, it may cause unnecessary alarm. If she walks up she risks being on the receiving end of a gesture that has, up until now been reserved for scorpions only.

So she wafts back and forth between making her presence known in some way, or just going up to the door and knocking.

Ultimately she decides on knocking. Knocking was good, even if it was well after midnight. She’s pretty sure he’s still up because he usually drops her off between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning anyway.

In the end there’s no need.

From behind her, a voice rough and accusatory asks, “What are you doing out here?”

Before she even turns around she can hear the sound of the knife being unsheathed. Really? Weren’t they passed that kind of thing already?

In an instant, he’s tackling her into the sand. As she’s wrestled into the ground, the knife is stabbed into the ground somewhere above her head. He takes both of her wrists in one hand and holds them above her head. “You’re not supposed to be here. I made that clear.”

Her eyes roll back in her head, and although she’s decided that’s a great way to actually get stabbed, she can’t help it. He’s so hopelessly dense. This scare tactic bullshit might have worked a few weeks ago when they’d first met, but not now. He’s betting that having a crazy guy with a knife come at her will be a deterrent, but he’s kind of only got one trick in his repertoire, and she’s seen it before. 

Yeah, she’s out here cause she misses him and not for a reason. “You’re an idiot, and I’m over this.” She raises her knee and kicks him in the gut without a second thought.

In an instant he’s no longer on top of her, but to the side doubled over in pain.

“I have some interesting information.” She fishes her glasses out of the sand and wipes them off on her tunic before sliding them on her nose.

“I don’t want it.”

“That’s a lie. Like come on. You can be as angry and emotionally constipated as you want, but let’s at least be honest with each other.”

“You should still probably go. Whatever it is you can deal with your family yourself, and I can deal with Shiro myself.” And she can’t help but think there’s an undercut of “We’re never going to get any answers anyway.” It’s mirrored in the way that he refuses to meet her gaze.

Like a pair of disposable chopsticks before Hunk begins a meal, something within her snaps. She’s white hot with rage all over in almost equal parts herself and at him. Because she’s a future _communication_ officer for fuck’s sake, and she hasn’t been effectively able to code switch to speak his animalistic language.

So it’s her chance to lunge herself at him. All 115 lbs. without the weighted belt Hunk made for her so she could make weight on entrance exam day.

He doesn’t expect it though. So, she’s able to take him buy the collar of his jacket and push him down into the sand. For a moment she’s so blinded by anger that she can’t stop herself. She takes his cheek in her palm and pushes his face downward into the sand. “You suck so much,” she says as she holds his hand there. “But you’re actually kind of helpful. So shut up and stop thinking about throwing me off for a minute.”

There’s a moment of silence between them, just her grinding Keith’s stupid face into the ground. She knows she has the upper hand for a moment because she’s still doing it. The position hasn’t been reversed.

“Sendak is sending something or someone here. Dealing with it’s going to be a lot easier if you come up off whatever info you’re sitting on.”

“There’s something we have to get out of the way first.”

There’s a hand jammed in her ribs and the positions are being switched once more. His hand is in her hair pulling her head roughly back. Her glasses are knocked askew again, and he feels like a boulder knocked loose from the mountains on top of her heavy and dense, and an unexpected annoyance.

So if she’s the protagonist of her own story, she gets killed off in the third act because she picked the wrong sidekick. Great. 

Instead of getting stabbed something far worse happens. Worse than getting choked or an old fashioned pummeling.

There’s lips on hers, chapped to the point of cracking. Well, they’re kind of on hers. His upper lip has missed hers completely. He’s dangerously close to doing something akin to eating her nose. His lower lip is at least kind of touching hers, but there’s too much pressure there. It’s almost like he’s concentrated all of his body weight onto that one place where their bodies are joined.

She said his breath smelled like death before. That might have been an understatement. His breath is thick and unrelenting. Dental care in the desert isn’t great.

“Nope.” Pidge says upon him pulling away. “We didn’t have to get that out of the way. You apparently did.” She makes a big show of wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. “Seriously, that was the worst. I didn’t expect movie quality bullshit, but I didn’t expect my first kiss to suck so bad.”

Keith’s mouth drops open, like she’s cursed his name, his shack, and his mother to filth. ‘It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Trust me, it was.” She juts her shoulder upward and rolls him off of her. She needs a tooth brush. Like a fresh toothbrush, and Lance’s special cavity protecting, tri colored toothpaste.  And one of his little floss toothpicks that she can use to floss his teeth without wrapping yards of it around her fingers.

“Oh, Like you felt nothing,” Keith gets up too. Both of their backs are turned to the shack, their glances turned towards the mountain.

“Did you not even hear me with the information part?”

“I needed to get that out of the way,” he says repeating himself.

“But no, it would be easier if I felt nothing. If I didn’t think if you were out here hungry or thirsty. It would be better if I thought you were useless.“ She rights herself and takes a few steps over to where he stands. “But we have more important things to deal with. So, if we have to get this out of the way.” This time she grabs him by the edges of his jacket.

She was foolish to think that she could do something better. Where Keith’s attempt was all lips hers is all teeth. They crack together for a moment, pull away from each other, and then try again. The second attempt is timid to the point of being pitiful. It’s the kind of kiss her grandmother would give on a cheek after pinching it thoroughly.  “Okay, if that’s out of our systems,” and she had really meant to say _you’re an_ d a singular _system._ Damnit. “We have to make up some kind of overly complex and impossible to pull off plan.”

 

It’s a dump. Pidge decides with little thought. There are multiple holes in the floorboard patched together with mismatched boards, and in one case it looks like a piece of cinderblock has been jammed down into one of the holes. In one corner there is a cook stove. The pipe leading to a propane tank is empty, meaning Keith hasn’t had access to proper fuel in a long time. There’s a ~~curtain~~ old sheet tacked up in the corner sectioning off what he assumes is the bed from the rest of the room.

There’s a blue upholstered antique style couch in the middle. The upholstery is ripped along the back, and the intricate carving of the woodwork around the frame is a deep cherry red. It looks out of place with the caved ceiling and dilapidated fireplace in the cabin.

The walls are covered with various bits of paper. On the wall on which the bed is jutted against, there are Garrison documents. On the other wall there are some statistical outputs she’d let him have when she was finished with them. Finally, there are photos, taken with an instant polaroid type camera tacked up against the wall. She immediately recognizes photos of the mouth of the cave, and the mountain range leading up to the range.

“Spill,” he commands throwing the deadbolt on the door shut.

“As I said, before you diverted the conversation, Sendak or someone close to Sendak is going to come here. For Voltron.” She sinks into the couch.

He just looks at her. Bares down on her with his gaze meaning he has a mouthful to say in response, but he demands that she finish first.

“Look I’ll skip the summaries of analysis. You’re clearly not interested. I’ll skip right to the part where I go straight to barely supported conclusions. You like those. I think they’re sending someone here to retrieve Voltron. It’s in the cave, but we can’t find it. It was supposed to be Phaelpo. They’re already here, but they’re not doing it for whatever reason. Long story short, we can intercept an alien invasion.”

Keith is fiddling at something over a section of the counter near the dysfunctional cook stove. “I know who Phaelpo is,” he speaks finally turning from the counter. He’s got a jar of something in his hand, and Pidge can see the displaced lid on the counter.

“Come on, I know that already. Get on my level please.”

“Okay, Phaelpo was my aunt.”

Pidge, still uninterested, reaches for the jar and takes a long draught of it after Keith does. It looks like tea, so it must be tea right?

“She raised me here.”

Pidge spits out the acrid, bubbly liquid in a fine mist spray across some of Keith’s untacked papers that are scattered about the floor. Immediately he scrambles to move them out of the way of the spray.

“Come on don’t be a,” Pidge can feel him say pussy even though he doesn’t actually utter the word. She has no idea that the only reason he bits his tongue is because he was hypothetically beating the shit out of guys at the Garrison who’d say the same thing. “It’s Kombucha. Like tea. Get over it.”

“Okay in addition to that being gross, I didn’t expect you to be raised by aliens. I was totally prepared for, ‘I’m Phaelpo,” or ‘I murdered this alien Phaelpo out in the desert before I tried murdering you multiple times.’ Sorry I didn’t consider alien relative as a possible plot twist.” But did that mean Keith really was an alien? It made her brain hurt. “Wanna talk about it? Might help us make a plan to save the world.”

 Keith disappears for a moment behind the drawn curtain. He emerges with several large, foul smelling books much like the one he had out on the bluffs.

He sits down with them on the floor facing the sofa so that he’s only a few inches away from Pidge’s knees. Pidge can feel big damp tracts of sweat form on her palms, because there are some very weird implications here. “Like blood relation?”

“I don’t think so? The story goes that she used to live in this rural mountainous region really far from here. Like Asia or somewhere. These people had too many kids to feed, and she was alone. So she took me.”

“You believe that?” Pidge tries to keep her tone as tactful as possible.

“What do you think?”  Keith opens one of the tomes and pulls out a faded and water stained polaroid from the dingy yellow black parchment pages. She sees a younger Keith standing in front of the shack they’re in now. He’s leaning into a shovel stuck deep into the unforgiving clay. He’s flanked by a woman with hair the color of straw, save for the thin blue streak in it. She’s got dark plum colored skin. She has a large red tattoo that bisects her face from forehead to chin, and then another that bisects it from eye to eye so that her face is divided into four even quadrants.

The photo does absolutely nothing to answer Pidge’s question.

“Can you read this? It upsets me.” He hands her a piece of loose paper that has been hastily crammed into the binding, much like the photo. It’s newer, not so sticky or yellow. It’s covered in many strange syllables that she doesn’t recognize. It’s different from the transmission she’s received over the radio.

“Um, I think I can get this.” She fishes her phone out of her pocket and scans it. The translation software she uses, takes a moment to understand the roots of the language. The minutes in between them are tense, to the point that Pidge thinks that maybe Keith had the right idea to begin with. Pretend none of this ever happened. She could just dart, and be gone into the night forever.

Then, the phone beeps and the display goes green. The translated text is available.

 “ _In my failure, and exile I have committed a great crime. 9000 years is quite an age, even by druid standards. I am lonely, and so the fifth taboo of the druid order is broken. I have parsed my remaining quintessence and created a life force to help cure me of this loneliness. He is not quite human, and not quite druid. It’s a very strange thing indeed. My druid intuition is long gone, but the need to experiment is not. It is only now that I realize the selfishness of my ways. In giving him life I have significantly shortened my own. I will die when he is quite young._

Pidge looks up from the text, Keith isn’t meeting her gaze. He’s moved onto thumbing through one of the texts. She can fill in the blanks. Phaelpo is dead.

“So maybe you can access the energy?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I have no time to be shocked by your tragic backstory.”

“That’s surprisingly comforting.” He looks at her with a cocked eyebrow, like he didn’t expect that kind of response. “So what do you have in mind?”  

“I have,” Pidge makes a few swipes on the device in her hand. She checks the most up to date analysis before she speaks. “No idea.” She tries to sink back into the couch, but the cushion is thin and unforgiving. “Hey, how can you read this, but not the transmission transcript?”

“There’s a difference between Druid script and that language.” Again, like that is supposed to actually explain something. Whatever.

“Anyway, I think I know why my hand went half dead after I touched the obelisk.”

“It’s her energy,” Keith interrupts.

“Yep, and you’re also her energy. So you can use it.” The phone isn’t big enough to provide the visuals she needs, so she’s moved onto the laptop. “Maybe. Or you’ll die. Great stuff right?”

Keith just looks at her blankly, the way he does when something has gone over his head, but he’s too proud to admit it. “Anyway, I think you should risk having your limbs fall off due to space rot. Cause you might be able to get Voltron, if you do.”

After that, it’s like they’d mutually pressed some kind of reset button. No knife pulling or grinding each other’s faces in the dirt. She’s got no reason to believe that the obelisk has been moved from the 27th sector, so she’s looking at blue prints of air ducts, the view angles of security cameras, and diagrams of the basements and sub-basements in the area.

He’s gone outside with an armful of plastic containers filled to the brim with numerous dark colored liquids. “We’re going to need more bombs for this,” he offers as explanation.

It’s almost like they’d pressed a reset button. Except for one little….or was it two little things. “Keith?” she asks when he’s come inside for a funnel and a measuring beaker that’s taken up residence by the window. “Now that the important stuff is out of the way, and we’ve got something like a plan going... What the fuck was that earlier?”


	6. Biological Indicators

In working through the night she’d developed something close to a plan on how to gain access to the obelisk. She’d also rifled through more of the druid documents.

_“It’s not here. There’s nothing here and I have been abandoned.”_

_“This loneliness wafts through me like a deadly Arusian draft. It will end me.”_

_“I have found travelers and mystics, psychics and telepaths on this place that the universe forsakes. They are begrudgingly accepting of me, but they possess no real power. Thus, I am on an endless vigil.”_

_“I will never find the blue lion, and so I will die on this planet in a few dozen millennia. The extra quintessence bestowed upon me for the mission becomes a curse. How my heart aches for my druid sisters. Even Haggar the delusional crone.”_

Blue lion? She mouths the words as her eyes bounce off the text. Were they looking for Voltron, or a blue lion? She thinks back to the radio transmissions that bounced back and forth from red to blue and back again.

_“I honestly do not know what I expected. Keith is a creature made of raw energy and my own discomfort. He’s temperamental and unruly. Although he is a child small and helpless, he is all I have. I am at his mercy.”_

In the meantime Keith had put together three remote sensor bombs. She’d even gone outside a few times to check on his progress. He’d used chemical waste from discarded vehicle batteries and cleaners and rigged them in a way that they wouldn’t combine until activated. The remote looked like something similar to a remote start vehicle.

She was impressed.

She wouldn’t tell him that. Instead it leaks out in thinly veiled barbs, “Good work, but I’d use more chlorine.”

“And you’d be dead.”

“You never answered my question,” she asks sometime later. It’s not until he can see the purple pink tinge  on the horizon that indicates that sunrise is only an hour or so away that he comes in from outside and tells her they need a few hours of sleep.    

Drafting the plans was exhausting. There were so many variables to account for and not enough controls in their favor. She was emotionally cognitively drained, but she wasn’t ready for sleep. Physically she was on razors edge as Keith lay inches away from her on the musty bed covered only by a sheet. Enveloped in the darkness of the curtain, she couldn’t see him or anything more than an inch or two in front of her nose.

Her whole world was reduced to the tactile sensation of their fingers tangled together in the scant space between them on the bed.

He’d been the one to just grab her hand like it was nothing, and hold it there. It reminded her of when she used to feed the stray cats in the ally back home. For days or even weeks they’d given her the cold shoulder, hissing at her and never letting her pet them. Then after a while she couldn’t shake them. They’d rub against her ankles as she walked to school, or try to follow her inside the house. Keith was somewhat like a stray cat in that regard. Whatever she’d done, the floodgates were opened, and she was probably going to drown in a sea of painfully awkward, yet well intentioned signs of affection.

Never mind the fact that she was the one squeezing onto his hand as if the bed was a void that threatened to open up and swallow her whole.  

He lets out a sigh. It’s not one of frustration, but taxation. “Does it matter? We like each other right?”

But it does Keith. It so does. She can feel her heartbeat go faster and faster until it sounds like it’s pounding on her ribcage and threatening to burst out of her skin. Because if he kissed her under the assumption that she’s a guy, and she’s not…They could have some major problems.

Like actually getting stabbed for real this time problems.

“Yeah, but…” she girts her teeth together and she can feel the sweat pooling between their hands. The thumping pressure of her heart can now be felt in her ears. It starts as a dull roar and builds to a deafening crescendo. “I-“ and he wouldn’t actually stab her right? Might get upset that their entire friendship was nestled on something like a lie. Before they’d met she never considered that anyone could mistrust the Garrison as much as she did, but there he was. His mistrust melted like ice and became a steady trickling hate. He’d understand right? “I’m um,” and even though she can’t see him he can _feel_ him looking at her. The slow blink, pinched mouth expression that said he was quickly losing interest. “I’m a um, you see I was banned from-“

She recalls one of their early meetings, he taunted her, “It’s what you’re supposed to say to girls to get them flustered.” So, he couldn’t be clueless.

“Just stop talking. It’s irritating that you think I’m so stupid or so unobservant.  I don’t care if you’re a girl or a guy or whatever.”

Pidge screws her eyes shut and waits for the torrent of verbal abuse, but it never comes because. Oh. For once Keith not caring about something is great, and beneficial, and beautiful. “How’d you know?”

He snorts and Pidge cringes in response. “Among many other reasons, there are two very compelling biological indicators pressed against me when we’re on the bike.”

 She starts throwing paltry attempts at punches through the darkness at where she thinks his abdomen right be.  “You’re awful.”

He catches her first fist. “What did I even do?” Then the second. For a moment he just holds her fists like that before pulling her forward so she’s half laying on his chest. “Other than want to kiss a girl?” Then there’s something soft and slightly moist pressed to her mouth. There’s no teeth knocking, and even in the darkness their lips actually meet. For a moment she decides that based on her previous evidence, there’s no way that a kiss can actually feel warm and inviting, and so void of anger or mutual frustration.   

“Put your rivets in the bomb casing backwards.” Pidge says softly when they part. “I saw you.”

He doesn’t even give her time to catch her breath. In an instant his mouth is back on hers. Where their mouths are joined together, it feels like she’s eaten something spicy, but like in a kind of good way. The feeling spreads to her fingertips and toes. Before she realizes the egregious crime she’s committed she’s got her hands weaved into his oily dark hair. “Yeah,” he breathes hotly against her face. “I really fucked those up…Still good though.” He blankets her mouth again.

The distribution is becoming less and less skewed as the ratio of kiss like monstrosities to pleasant romance manga kisses (thanks for leaving those around Lance) begins to even out. It’s terrifying.

So she ups the ante and opens her mouth into the kiss.

She prepares herself for a wave of rancid tastes and smells that creep up from her mouth and into her nose as their tongues meet. It doesn’t come. Instead she’s greeted with the slightly medicinal. When the hell did he have time to brush his teeth in-between rigging bombs?

* * *

If someone or something is coming, they don’t have time to clutch and grope at each other until odd hours of the morning. It’s difficult though when he’s able to lap at her neck in a gesture that’s not quite kissing or biting but somewhere in between, and she’s making those amazing vulnerable noises that shoot straight through him and cumulate just below his stomach. He finds out he can do it to her earlobes too and she’ll flail and squirm before finally melting into it.

It’s clear that she’s new to this. Guess she doesn’t really have the time or the opportunity if she’s trying to convince everyone around her she’s a dude. If he were a man without conviction he could eat her alive.

He’s never wished more that he had a reading light or something battery powered near by. If he did he’d throw the switch and see if her lips were red and swollen. He’d see if he’s left any marks on the patches of skin underneath the places he’s pulled the tunic down and covered with his mouth.

After a while he has to be the one to pull away. Has to make sure those convictions are firmly rooted into place. Has to tell her to go to sleep and force himself to do the same.

When he wakes, even the enclosed sleeping area is not safe from the bright rays of the sun. It’s hot but he doesn’t feel like he’s about to be baked into the top sheet. It must be before noon.

A cursory glance at Pidge’s wristwatch confirms that it’s 10:00. He parts the curtain, goes to the cabinet near the disconnected cook stove, and pulls out a jar of kombucha and a bag of cashews mixed with raisins. “Hey,” he pokes Pidge a few times in the ribs.  “Wake up. We slept way longer than anticipated.”

“Huh what?” Pidge pulls her glasses back on.

Keith slides back into bed next to her. “I need your help rigging the bomb switches. If you think you have time.”

“I think I will. The plan’s fucked from my end anyway.” She rakes a hand through the bag of nuts and dried fruit and frowns. “No chocolates?”

“Can’t afford it.”

She scowls. “Anyway there’s like, one good way into where the obelisk is, and it’s a shitty way in anyway, but it’s the best I can come up with for now.

Keith nods, and opens the jar of tea.

“Can I ask you something Keith?” She asks between yawns.

He doesn’t want to respond because he knows she’ll just ask anyway she’s too nosy for her own good despite constantly knowing far too much. “Go ahead,” he responds after a long belabored pause.

“What was your relationship with Shiro? Exactly?”

He can feel the blood in his veins turn to ice. He was used to Pidge posing questions that he had no way of answering. The difference was that he was used to them being purely rhetorical. “Why?” He takes a half step backwards and diverts the pooling feel of dread in his gut because it was a fair question. They’ve both banded together under the vague understanding that this was for “family” and a “friend” respectively. But those words hold so much more meaning.

“You fell asleep before me. We were pretty um…you know keyed up. And you were saying his name…In a tone.”

He’d made peace with the fact that he was going to go along with whatever plan Pidge drummed up and that it was probably going to end in disappointment. He wanted the truth. He didn’t expect to find him alive. “Wishful thinking I guess. We went on like, a few dates, if you could call them that. I’m bad at grieving.”

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t slightly upset that he’d “gotten” further with Pidge in the past 24 hours than he did on the handful of dates that he and Shiro went on. Back then he was distant and Shiro was unsure.

Now, he sees himself throwing himself headfirst into whatever _this_ was. He’s upset, but he doesn’t regret it.

“Oh,” Pidge takes a swig of kombucha. He watches the muscles in her throat constrict as she tries to choke it down. “I get it. Kind of.” She screws up her face in the same way she often does when he gives brief and overtly vague answers.  “My grief has certainly manifested itself in strange ways, or in inappropriate contexts. Not that that was inappropriate. I just um, was curious.”

* * *

It doesn’t matter. Not in the way it didn’t matter that Keith stopped coming to the Garrison to pick her up ’didn’t matter’ but in a way that makes her feel legitimately relieved. First loves didn’t work out, so where did that leave first, ‘confused and frustrated people with common goals.’ It didn’t matter, because sleeping next to and making out with an emotionally restricted guy in between making bombs and drafting infiltration plans was nice, but it wasn’t everything. She’d throw it all away and sell him up the river if it meant finding out what happened to Matt and Dad.

She knows it.

He knows it.

And it eases her guilt a little bit. Before she was certain that Keith would never do the same if it meant finding out something about Shiro. He was burdened by too many constricting principles.

Still there’s this tingling of uncertainty that the plan is going to fail tremendously. She’s going to have to do something to cover her ass, and she’s already looking for an alternative plan.

It doesn’t stop her from leaning up into his space that night when he drops her off at the rotten cactus so she can begin her trek back to the dorm and kissing him with the same bruising pace that he’d subjected her to the night before.  Because fuck it.

They’d gone back and forth on how to best execute the plan. They still had no idea when Sendak’s ship was going to arrive, and decided that the sooner they did something the better.

Pidge can’t keep back the sour feeling in her gut, that if this falls through she’s going to be reduced to gleaning info from log files in the garbage.

“I know this is impossible for you,” he says as she turns her back to leave “but try to keep a low profile in the next 24 hours, Katie.”  

She cringes. Just because she told him her given name didn’t mean he had to say it. “Right.”

* * *

This was bad. He’d lost a bomb off the bike in a particularly craggy part of the dunes. In addition to nearly blowing himself to smithereens, he’d lost one of ~~their~~ his precious supply. He was pretty sure Pidge’s plan would still work without it. The bombs were mostly distractors, a way to get him into Garrison property and a way for him to get his hands on that energy.

Still, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking as he spread the bombs across the edge of the bluffs. He can feel the icy touch of fear and insecurity wrapping their arms around his neck and squeezing tightly because this is so much different than the remedial level reconnaissance work he’d been doing on his own.  

He also can’t shake the feeling that if something about this plan goes wrong, at least on the Garrison end, he’s going to end up responsible for her. Keith doesn’t do responsible.

He barely has time to get the bombs planted before the atmosphere changes. The leaves on the scant trees planted on the Garrison campus blow backward. Sand is kicked up from everywhere, and the wind shifts from rough to relentless.

Then, his gaze turns to the sky.

There’d been a small part of him that thought Pidge was just making this shit up. Every day, she was reading off of transmissions he didn’t understand and was just trying to wind him up.

The fact that he’s staring down an incoming aircraft of undetermined, and undeniably unworldly origin violently erases all trace of doubt.

This was bad.


	7. How do you feel about blood samples?

Keith could consider his entire life a series of unsuccessful plans, failed attempts, and futile attempts at picking up the pieces only to be knocked down again.

He remembers being 11 or 12. Phaelpo had him out in the yard drawing sigils in the sand. He distinctly remembers drawing the symbol for crying backwards, so that when she came outside and invigorated the sigils with her unworldly power, it rained frogs instead of water.

He’d expected to be cursed out for days in response to that. Instead, they just ate frog legs for weeks on end.

He’s 15, and it has taken him twenty-eight hours after arriving on the Garrison campus to get into a fistfight. To make everything better, he’s pulled off the loud mouthed, pig nosed bastard by none other than the Garrison’s most prized cadet officer Shirogane. Shiro all but tells him he isn’t “mad” but he’s “disappointed.” He can remember being floored by the feeling of embarrassment. Kill him. Kill him now.

He’s 17 and he’s leaving the Garrison and moving back to the shack that he’d vowed to never return to. He arrives to find it empty and untouched, and he can’t believe it’s finally happened. Phaelpo threatened for years that she was hanging onto the edge of death. She would always wail that this was the price for giving Keith life. He never expected it to actually happen. He’d always imagined that he’d feel free. He feels lost instead.

He’s 18 and he almost kills a girl out in the desert. Instead of avoiding him at all costs, she actually doesn’t seem to mind him.

But, he doesn’t think anything that he’s ever planned has ever been quite thoroughly botched before.  Pidge’s plans are all theoretically grounded. There’s evidence to back up every move, and it’s maddening to watch her meticulously comb through information while time is wasted.

It’s not that Pidge can’t think on her feet. She can. It’s the insistence that there has to be a plan in the first place. Especially when theoretical is often booted out the window for the hypothetical. At this rate, having a plan is useless, because everything that could’ve gone wrong with it has.  

First, they didn’t expect whomever was coming to be here less than 48 hours after Pidge received the transmission. They’d settled on enacting the plan that night, but they didn’t anticipate doing it with a large alien ship barreling ever near while it happened.

Such is this (his) disastrous life.

Fuck it.

He’d detonated the bombs anyway because as far as he knew (Pidge hadn’t buzzed him on the stolen communicator watch she’d rigged up for him) she was already in place. The plan was dependent upon their rendezvous in the cargo bay of sector 26.

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t hell bent on reclaiming that obelisk. He’d seen Phaelpo kill a pack of desert coyotes once with cotton candy pink lightening that streamed from the tips of her fingers. If he _could_ harness a portion of that energy knows he could put it good use.

He’d also be lying if he said that watching the alien aircraft descend, hover, and land as he slid down the dunes and darted toward the Garrison didn’t make him emit a scream that was akin to the sound Pidge makes when she’s been snuck up on and _someone_ inserts their spit covered index finger into her ear. Not that he knows at all what that sounds like either.

And of course because there’s a goddamn alien ship landing, there’s clueless Garrison douches everywhere. He neither has the time nor the mood to knock these guys out, but he does because he can hear Pidge chirping over the comm now, “Um, so I’m still en route, but there’s a slight problem.”

Under-fucking-statement. They were supposed to have the blue lion when this happened so that they would be ready.

“Get to the rendezvous point, I’m going to need you.”

The initial plan before it started going to hell: the moment they started, was to rendezvous after he’d ignited the distraction bombs. The classified areas would be empty or near empty in the confusion. For better or for worse, they had a bigger and better distraction. She’d come in with updated codes and hack away at whatever encryption was used to store the obelisk away from their reach.

“Well that’s part of the problem, my roommates.” He wants to mute the comm because really Pidge? Just deal with the situation.

He’s got Pidge’s map memorized. Fifty feet straight, left turn then twenty feet, then another left. But something stops him after the first left and it makes his mouth go dry. There’s a large well lit room with a man strapped down. But the plan’s already gone to hell so when he feels compelled to clock multiple Garrison officers then use Pidge’s comm to patch into this room using Pidge’s, he feels minimal guilt. The obelisk isn’t going anywhere, right?

When he gets the room unlocked he feels like he’s been punched in the gut.

The hair is all wrong. White against black where it should be nothing but jet black. He’s bigger now, and there’s muscle on top of muscle. He has to get the scarf away from his face, because he feels like he’s being smothered. There’s no way it could be him, “Shiro?” But it’s undeniably him.

By the time he’s got his arm around Shiro, and feels the early of panic set in. The blinders on, fight or flight bullshit that caused errors to be made in spades. How was he going to get out of here while dragging Shiro? Pidge skids into the room…With two more people in tow.

“There’s no way I’m letting you save Shiro.”

So the atmosphere of the mission automatically shifts again from botched to fucked.

“Seriously Pidge, you had to fuck this up too?”

“I fucked this up? Where was my fourth bomb Keith?” She closes her eyes and shakes her head from side to side. “We don’t have time for this Keith. You do realize that Shiro’s the guy they sent to kick ass and take the blue lion?”

He freezes as ice runs through his veins, because no he hadn’t thought of that. He was so caught up in accepting the fact that Shiro was here, and alive, and there was no other outcome than that it was a good thing.

“Pidge, as your roommate, I feel you should’ve told me you and Mullet were friends.”

“Big man take this.” He’s shoving Shiro’s unconscious form at the impossibly big man that flanks Pidge to the left. Then he hands Pidge the keys to the bike. “Get Shiro out of here, and circle around. I’m still going for the obelisk.”

“What if he wakes up and tries to kill me? Can you just stop and think about how badly we’ve executed everything up until this point? There are going to be consequences for that.”

But that’s the thing he has, and it’s so fucked it can only get more diluted at this point.  

“I am. We’ve come this far and I’m not leaving whatever power they sent here for Ajumma.”

“Take this.” She shoves a tablet and a few chords into his hand. “The starting sequence is 0827. It should run by itself after you patch in. If you get captured, I’ll break in and kill you.”

Before she has a chance to reply, he’s darted out of the room and is running down the hall toward  the obelisk.

* * *

From the moment she saw Hunk and Lance join her out on the sand she knew the plan was fucked. _Okay_. From the moment she realized that the ship was probably, most likely, coming in real fast and real hot _tonight._ So the plan was probably fucked when she found that out. But, there was still a chance that she and Keith would get where they needed to go before it was super fucked.  Right?

If she tells them to go away, there’s a good chance that Lance will double down and hang out. Before she knows it, Hunk is asking her questions. Getting her in a way that only he can, and she’s spewing information out that she probably really shouldn’t be. Which might take the plan from semi-fucked to actual fucked. It’s hard to predict an accurate level of fuckery when there’s just so much going wrong on so many different scales.

Then she sees the ship, and by their agreed upon timeline, Keith has probably just set the bombs up. So, actual fucked to mega fucked becomes the current estimate. Cool. Really cool. Liabilities or not she has to make it inside and to the rendezvous point. They’re never going to get another shot at this.

* * *

 

“See, I told you I would save Shiro,” Lance and Hunk have the other man balanced between them. The movements are awkward and slow. So it’s up to her to fend off whatever other Garrison personnel that cross their paths. The three of them are easily recognized as Garrison cadets themselves, so it is they hesitate, and order them to stand down. She doesn’t. Spending time with Keith has improved her hand to hand reaction time. She manages to land a few kicks to the gut.

But as soon as they come up on anyone with weapons drawn, it’s so over. She’d thought about grabbing a rusty kitchen knife from Keith’s utensil drawer before the mission, but she was afraid of getting laughed at if she actually had to pull it anyone. Now she’s kicking herself for having nothing.

The sense of dread and inadequacy is intensified by their separation.

She can’t stop thinking about how she should be the one patching into classified Garrison areas, and he should be the one kicking ass, and that the plan was coordinated in such a way that because they needed one to fill in gaps in the other’s weakness. The two of them combined made one very well rounded person, and they needed each other.  

They round the corner and there’s three Garrison officers with batons drawn. “Hunk, trade me. Trade me right now.” She takes the weight off of Hunk, and realizes he was carrying this guy for a reason. He’s like a sack of bricks. 

“Pidge I really don’t want to do this, I-“

“Bust some ass Hunk. That’s an order!”

Somehow they make it out, and as if led by divine intervention she successfully leads them to the bike. Before the four of them clamber on she pokes her finger at Shiro’s chest. “So help me god, do not wake up during any of this.”

He doesn’t so much as stir, so she takes it as a good sign.

Getting Keith’s speeder started is worse than the ATV she took from the equipment shed. The key doesn’t fit quite right in the ignition and she has to fiddle with it to get it to turn over. She also has to throw all of her weight on to the starter while trying her hardest not to flood the engine. The going is sluggish and the bike barely makes it over the dunes with the extra weight. 

Once they get started all she can do is hope that Keith will be finished by the time they circle around, because it’s only a matter of time before more Garrison personnel are sent out to the crash site to intervene.

* * *

He can hardly believe it’s just sitting there on a table in the center of the room under dim fluorescent lighting and little else. But it did take a few minutes for Pidge’s code to patch in and get through. He raises his hand to the box.

His finger is zapped by an invisible trip wire of some kind. Maybe laser, but he can’t be sure. That’s Pidge’s area of expertise.  

Oh, so it wasn’t that easy.

It had to be the stupidest idea he’s ever had. He unsheathes the knife, and stabs it into the table, then reaches for it again. It’s something like he’s seen on the grainy television screens in the Garrison rec room, and no there’s no fucking way this should work, but somehow it does. His hands latch onto the obelisk and he pulls the box forward.

With his hands on either side of the box, he feels energy shoot from his fingers to his toes, and to the very ends of the strands of his hair. It feels like being out in the cave. He stands by his statement, that it felt like getting tased but nicer. It feels like that and more. Not like, a higher intensity of tasing. That would hurt. No, it feels like getting tased in a nice way, plus kissing Pidge, plus kicking the ass of someone who really deserves it, and having Shiro’s arms around him. It’s amazing.

It’s amazing, but it’s not enough. He needs to harness that energy, not just have a taste of it.

He traces the symbols with his right thumb. It’s all in the alien script that’s different from the Druid sigils that were violently engraved on his heart. He finds Phaelpo’s name among them and traces it. “Come on you old crone. Can you actually do right by me once?”

A rough throaty voice sneaks up the back of his neck and into his ear. “Do right by you? Why bother? It’s never been appreciated.”

“Stop fucking with me. Shiro and Pidge need me,” he barks back. 

Her chuckle, deep and sadistic is there in his ears too. “They need you, or you need them?”

“Stop it Ajumma,” he says through clenched teeth. He can barely drag the obelisk across the table, let alone lift it. He has no idea how he’s going to get at whatever’s inside.

“They’ll both leave you. That’s what you get for leaving me.”

“Shut up.” And he yanks the obelisk and lets it fall to the floor. It cracks against the tiles on the floor. A shining pink substance oozes out, seeks him. It’s not quite liquid or gas and it laps at his feet and wafts upward toward his wrists and palms. It sinks into his skin, scorches through him like a shot of bottom shelf whiskey. He wants to barf and punch something at the same time.

“You’re too easy Keith,” Phaelpo’s voice is in his ear a final time with a deep chuckle.

In the end, it’s all very anticlimactic. The energy is absorbed and little else happens. His strength feels the same when he’s punching his way through walls of Garrison soldiers trying to detain him. The glow is gone, and wow what if this (Shiro’s extraction aside) has been a colossal waste of time?

That doesn’t matter as much as getting out of here, he can only hope that Pidge can make it back around and pick him up.

* * *

She can see him running out of the exit towards their current path. Garrison’s on their tail and his. There isn’t going to be time to slow down. “I can’t slow down!” she yells hoping he can hear her over engine’s roar.

“Floor it!” at least, that’s what she thinks he says. She’s no lip reader. Against her better judgement, she does as Keith says and revs the engine surging them forward. What happens next is like something out of one of the testosterone driven action flicks Hunk leaves going in the background while they do homework.

Or she assumes it would be, if the speeder weren’t already weighted down past capacity. He grabs the throttle as they pass, and he pulls himself upward onto the seat. She somehow has enough sense to scoot back while keeping her hand on the throttle.

The burgeoning speeder bumps against the ground below them at the added weight.

She lets out a breath that she’s been holding for a very long time when he’s seated and his greasy hair starts to flap in her face.

* * *

“Did you get to it?”

Him and the big man heft Shiro off the bike. He’s still out cold after all of that.  

“What happened after you opened it?”

It’s concerning how out of it he is. He doesn’t stir through the chase, or a drop off a cliff.

“Do you have alien powers now?”

He does stir when in an attempt to not run into Pidge while he’s carrying Shiro inside, bumps his head against the doorframe. It’s both embarrassing and comforting.

“Can I wave the Geiger counter over you?”

“Are you squeamish? How do you feel about blood samples?”

“Pidge please calm down for a minute.”

Her eyes go wide with shock for a moment. Probably expecting some kind of verbal jab, but quite frankly he’s too exhausted, which was weird. Shouldn’t he feel more powerful and energetic than he ever has in his life right now?

They get Shiro settled on the bed. The tall one, Lentz? Lawrence? Is picking at the tech Pidge has left behind and is currently ragging on her for “settling on hanging out with Keith,” when “He already had the coolest pilot as a roommate.” He was a special kind of oblivious. The big man has taken to rifling through Pidge’s things as well, but it looks like he’s making himself useful and putting something together.

So she joins him at the bed, curtains pulled back looking at Shiro.

“We still have to be prepared for him not being himself. He was sent here for a reason.”

He wants to snap back at her that he knows that. He wants to beg her to just let him not think about that for a moment. All he wants right now is to just appreciate the fact that Shiro is here and that Shiro is alive.

But he can’t because Pidge is too damn perceptive for her own good, and time has never been on his side.

As soon as the words are out of her mouth Shiro’s eyes have snapped open. His right hand is glowing. Something tells Keith he’s seen that sickly sweet shade of purple pink before. Glyphs drawn in the sand and illuminated with Phaelpo’s power, the obelisk, and now his friend.

Seriously, fuck druid magic.


	8. Personal growth doesn’t negate being a goddamn jerk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're nearing the end of this fic folks. Thanks for all the support.

Growing up Keith had a knack for getting curses placed on him. Much like his aunt he had a big mouth and an incurable temper. Where she killed, threatened, or ignored those that annoyed or scorned her, he was not so lucky. He had all of the unpleasant traits as she did, but none of the power. As such, name the entry level, “Magic 101” curse, and he’s had it placed on him.

He remembers stealing apples out of an ancient woman’s orchard one afternoon when he was walking back into their remote mountain home. He’d spent the day fishing in the town’s reservoir. For being so old and frail looking, she could spot someone rooting through her orchard from a mile away. She could also run very quickly. In her rage, she made all of his fish freshly caught rot on the line instantly.

There was an incident right before the Garrison where he’d gotten into a heated argument with a Shinto priestess. He’d thought it was all in good fun. He thought she was going to react well when he decided to ‘win’ the argument by kissing her. Instead, she wordlessly went to the souvenir amulets kept at the shrine’s counter. She plucked a doll from among the omamori and the smaller torii and rummaged underneath the table for awhile.

With a hammer and nail in tow, she nailed the doll to a tree.  It felt like he was getting punched in the chest repeatedly.

Phaelpo typically undid them without a question as to what he’d actually done. Except for the time a particularly annoying wizard sealed his lips shut. It was awful, like his mouth disappeared completely. She left him like that for about six hours, and threatened to never undo it.

For as long as he could remember he was getting cursed and she was lifting them. She had a sigil branded into her left palm. The scar tissue was a deep red, much like the tattoos on her face. It was rounded around the edges with two parallel lines on top. She’d lift the most uncomfortable of curses, only by touching the affected area with the sigil.

So the only idea he has on how to use and harness whatever energy he’d been given was to replicate it.

He stands out back in the moonlight with knife in hand.

He can hear the door close alongside footsteps coming out back. Damnit Pidge.

“Keith?” She calls. “What are you doing out here?” She asks when she meets him.

“Probably something that you’d think is stupid.”

“Elaborate.” Pidge pushes the glasses up on her nose.

“Well, it’s based in magic, I have only circumstantial evidence to go on, and it involves me stabbing myself.”

“That’s pretty dumb.” She exhales and looks at him. “But you don’t tell me how to conduct analysis. I won’t tell you how to….Magic…”

He’d expected her scream when knife hit flesh, or at the very least flinch. She doesn’t. Instead she goes back to the bike for his first aid kit and wordlessly hands him the near empty bottle of antiseptic. “It’s not that stupid in comparison to other things I’ve seen you do Keith.”

 

* * *

Shiro’s eyes have snapped open. His right hand is glowing. Something tells Keith he’s seen that sickly sweet shade of purple pink before. Glyphs drawn in the sand and illuminated with Phaelpo’s power, the obelisk, and now his friend.

Seriously, fuck druid magic.

“Keith, now would be a great time to wow me with your new amazing powers.”

“Do you even know how anticlimactic literally all of that was Pidge? Because it was the worst.”

“Guys maybe this isn’t the best time to be fighting about this?” The big man suggests.

And damn it, how the hell has she goaded him into wasting more time? Shiro’s sitting up now and staring them both down with a murderous gaze. The guy before them could kick puppies and take candy from babies. Definitely not the Sergeant Shirogane he knew.

“Pidgeon, what’s going on?” the other one asks.

Okay. The strangers don’t matter. Pidge doesn’t matter. All that matters is stopping whatever it is Shiro is about to do. Which means he’s going to have to think like a Druid. He doesn’t know much about them, other than hearing his aunt curse them to filth, but it feels gross.

“Meddling Druid,” Shiro finally speaks. It’s a voice that’s raspy, foreign and not his own.

“There’s faulty magic here,” he speaks in Druid tongue. His pronunciation is sloppy, but it rolls off easily. A cracked old fortune teller once said this to Phaelpo. She killed her with telepathic asphyxiation instantly. He could only assume that it was a cultural Druid insult. Whether it’s going to do any good here remains to be seen, but it buys him time even if it is only a few scant seconds.

Shiro stands and clenches his glowing hand into a fist. He could feel the other three in the room go still.

There’s a feeling deep in his gut that tells him to get the upper hand. Shiro’s always been better at hand to hand combat. Now he’s at an even greater advantage. But there’s an equally loud voice pounding in the back of his ears that tells him that there is in fact faulty magic here, and that it _can_ be exploited.

Shiro would never try to kill him.

Shiro would probably never even considering hurting him regardless of what the circumstances were.

And he’d bet what little he had on the fact that whomever sent him here didn’t anticipate him being sent back to his exact base, where there were people who knew him and even cared for him. There is faulty magic here, and it will soon be exposed.

So something very rigid, and very prideful within him snaps. For the first time in his life, he doesn’t fight back when Shiro lunges.

Pidge darts backward.

Pidge’s roommates rush forward in an attempt to intervene.

Luckily he has the sense to bark, “stop,” over his shoulder, and they have the sense to listen.

Shiro cocks back his arm to strike, but the blow doesn’t come.  His illuminated hand simply hangs rigid in mid-air. “What’s the matter?” he teases the spell that’s binding Shiro. Phaelpo always told him that her magic was limited. It was bound by both reason and logic. According to her it made it the most useless kind of magic.

But right now he loves it. The magic is weakened by forcing Shiro to do something that whatever small conscious part of him is left knows that he would not do. Shiro has his hand, he has his own. The same magic courses through them. Where this husk of Shiro has intent, he has knowledge…and possibly for the first time ever, restraint.

He rubs his freshly wounded palm across Shiro’s fist. It should hurt, but he can feel the sigil cut deep within his skin absorbing the energy. Nothing around the wound can feel its impact. “Come on Shiro,” he leans his head back so that it hits the floorboard. “You’re not going to go through with this.” Under his breath, just on the off chance the witch that put this curse on Shiro can hear he says in barely a whisper, “My magic is better.”

Shiro’s hand stops glowing. His body goes limp and he falls on Keith. He’s so heavy, but he’s not exactly in a rush to see if the extraction actually worked.

But that idiot Lance is.

“Oh, my God Shiro are you okay? I saved you.” He can hear a smacking sound even buried underneath the larger man. “Oh yeah, Hunk helped too,” followed by the sound of another slap.

Shiro raises his head and for a moment they lock eyes. “Keith?” he blinks a few times. “What am I doing here?”

“He’ll explain,” Pidge interrupts, if you get off of him. “Although I’m sure he loves it, you’re also kind of crushing him.” Pidge offers him a hand up. He takes it, and Pidge almost ends up with her ass on the floor in the process. Shiro helps her up after her failed attempt to help him.

* * *

Shiro gravitates towards Pidge almost immediately. His first words to are, “Keith tells me that you were integral in my rescue.” He takes her hand in his cybernetic one. She doesn’t even so much as flinch. “Thank you.”

Then they go retrieve the green lion together.

He can hear Phaelpo taunting him, “You’re too easy Keith.” The words irritate him so much that they make him want to be a better person…but that would mean letting go of the irritation.

Where before he might have felt pangs of jealousy that the two of them could get along without him, now it’s a comforting feeling. He can’t explain why he’s had this shift in attitude. His whole life he’s felt unease towards emotions other than anger, and contempt, and rage. It’s not that he hasn’t felt other emotions before, he’s just fought them at every turn.

He fought Shiro for so long.

And despite the feeling of new found peace with multiple emotions, it feels like he’s still fighting Pidge. They grow distant when they board the castle. When they were together before they were always alone. They were always free to let their various tics and habits run free. They could simultaneously drive each other up the wall and help each other.

But now it’s about them plus five other people. It requires more honing, more suppressing, more limiting of the self for the better of the team.

It’s not exactly the environment either of them thrive in.

It’s not exactly an environment that the shitty and totally doomed duo of Keith and Pidge thrive in either.

In the afternoons on Earth he’d scrounge around in town for food and supplies, then he’d find some quiet shade to nap in before waiting to pick Pidge up. Now he just wanders around like he’s lost. It’s much easier to dip into the training room or slip into an observation deck alone than it is to go down to the hangar or pry the door open to Pidge’s lab. It’s not that he doesn’t have a purpose anymore. It’s actually bigger and better now.

It doesn’t stop him from feeling lost.

They have immediate and unfettered access to information, technology, food, and water. There’s nothing to scrounge around for. Plans are birthed and seen to fruition by much more capable and extremely trustworthy minds.

He’s completed his mission, and hers has barely begun.

But watching them together is good. They thrive together.

Shiro is smart enough to be able to halfway pay attention and still ask relevant questions. Shiro is a link to her family, and her family is everything. She’s made that apparently clear since day one.

She can tell him her secret. He’d held it for so long, and he always though that he’d feel jealous when everyone else knew. But it’s Shiro, and he can’t.

She can work on his arm. When it happens he doesn’t look afraid or pinned or about to attack. Shiro deserves that, he deserves to have a few scant moments where he isn’t on edge. Even though Pidge is the one that brings that out in him, he can’t help but feel a sense of pride when she does. Because being around people is hard, and his people like each other.

* * *

“Look, I know you expect this kind of thing to piss me off, but it’s not working. “ It’s kind of a lie, because she expects this kind of thing from Lance. From him on the other hand…

Keith’s new found…buffer zone…is something she’s not used to. She swears he’s changed since the botched recovery mission. In ways that don’t just stem from recovering a giant kind of magical alien robot from an enemy ship and trying to save the universe.

He actually stops and thinks about stuff now. Even if it’s just for a split second before he pulls his knife or breaks maneuver in the lion.

She has no proof, but she’s certain it’s due to Phaelpo’s recovered energy.

But it was stupid of her to think that she’d use his powers for good. Personal growth doesn’t negate being a goddamn jerk.

“Pidgeon, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lance says with a smug expression and closed eyes. His hand is jammed up into the juice dispenser and he can’t get it out. So she’s been summoned by Shiro and told to bring her favorite cutting torch to take care of the job. He looks so stupid. His gangly long limbs all folded in on themselves and crushed next to the machine.

To make matters worse, Keith also has his hand caught in the machine, his shorter limbs crushed against Lance’s. “Keith wanted a drink, it didn’t come out, so he got pissy. Then of COURSE I had to save him.”

“You decided to save him by shoving your own hand into the jammed machine?”

The whole thing is out of character for Keith, and she can’t shake the feeling she’s being baited. Pre-magic Keith wouldn’t go this far to mess with anyone. Post-magic Keith on the other hand….

“I assure you I used process of elimination first.”

“Kay, I’m bored with this.” Seemingly effortlessly, Keith shakes his hand free from the machine, gets up, and walks away.

“Wait you weren’t stuck?” Lance gasps in indignation.

“Keith were you just holding onto the juice box?” She asks as he turns to leave. “You’re a dead man Kogane.”

“Oh, you are so going to pay for this Keith,” Lance tries to spit it out with venom, but he looks like he’s going to cry, because he actually is stuck. Simultaneously he shoots Pidge a look that says, “please help and please don’t say anything,” and she does help because he always pays her back in triplicate.

Should she tell him he’s on flashlight holding duty in the lab for the next month before or after she cuts him out?

Yeah, something was up. Beforehand, if he wanted to get someone riled up, he’d just stare at them till they got pissed off. He was never the type to be in it for the long haul before.

* * *

She’s working on the cloaking devices for the green lion when she hears the slow, almost delayed sound of the automatic doors open. It’s funny almost, how fast they are in comparison to how slow the doors are.

To be honest, she’s not exactly in the mood for company. She’s been able to amplify the energy used to power the cloaking device, but despite the increase in power the surface area hasn’t increased. If it’s not a matter of energy, what is it? Metamaterials? In an initial scan she didn’t find anything… Then again they’re dealing with a ton of elements unknown on Earth. Maybe this is a problem that requires a look over by Hunk.

She stares at the energy output with wide eyes and an open mouth. But she’s obsessed with finding that little _extra_ step that will push her thought process over the edge and get her thinking in the right direction. She pokes absent mindedly at the cloaked portion of the green lion, the front left paw over and over and over again until she’s all but forgotten that someone has come into the lab.

She keeps forgetting until she can feel a pair of eyes on her and see a shadow looming over her, and next thing she knows she’s on the receiving end of a sloppy open mouthed kiss, complete with teeth clink. “Oh,” she says softly not quite shifting here glance to meet his properly. “We’re still doing that.”

“Yeah,” he pauses for a moment. “If you’re still okay with that,” he says in a tone that’s almost uncharacteristically soft.  

“I have no real reason to not be okay with it,” Pidge responds. “But I am curious,” she pauses and adds a new line of code to what she has going. Maybe power isn’t enough. Maybe it needs to be diverted to specific power points within the lion. Her mouth falls open again as she watches the energy being diverted. The lion is no less visible, but it looks lighter in color, almost like she’s looking at it on an old television with bad reception.

“Oh my god Pidge close your mouth it’s disgusting.”

She actually complies, but takes the time to stick her tongue out at him between pursed lips first.

“I’m curious how it’s going with Shiro,” she finishes finally in between edits on the fly. At this point she has no idea what she’s really doing with the code, or what she’s already tried. However, she really thinks she’s on to something here, and intends to use it for the basis of making this whole thing invisible. 

“How would I even know? You’re always with him.”

She looks up just in time to see something like a smile across his face. It still makes her feel uncomfortable. Like he’s going to try something annoying. Pick her up and throw her into the fluff room, or giving her a friction burn by grabbing her forearm in between his hands and twisting in opposite directions. But it’s something she could get used to in time.

“But really, it’s not a big deal. He’s here. That was my goal.”

“Uh-huh-“ she hums.

“We weren’t really like a thing before. I’ll wait till he’s ready if he wants to talk about it.”

“Hmmm…” She drops the laptop next to her and meets his gaze again. “Demonstrating a lot of emotional maturity there Kogane. Think that Druid magic did something to you.”

“Me too.” He leans an arm up against the wall as he tries to read Pidge’s code upside down.  “She always said that I was broken and incomplete, because she herself was broken and incomplete. “ He pauses for a moment and runs his hand over the scarred symbol. “It’s basically the worst super power ever.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says in a disinterested tone. “I actually have a diagnostic test I wanted to run on that. We need to see what you’re capable of, because as of right now, it’s loosely defined and vague to the point of being boring. Gimme.” She reaches towards him for his hand.

“Sure if you think it will help.” He gives her his hand.

Carefully she runs her fingers across the non scarred portions of his palm.  Then the tips of her fingers ghost gently over his own. Finally, she traces the symbol. It’s still an angry red with fresh scar tissue. She wonders if it feels nice for him. She can tell that he’s conflicted, torn between fear and contact.

She raises the palm to her hand and gives it a wide sloppy lick from the tip of his middle finger to his wrist. Then she pushes it away.

“Seriously Pidge?” He’s wiping his hand on his jeans as soon as he pulls away.

“Diagnostic complete.”


	9. You didn't win anything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp...Here it is. Never did I ever think I'd dedicate 29 THOUSAND words to a bonafide rarepair, but here we are. Thanks for everyone who's kept up and left comments and kudos in response. You rock.

“I’ve decided to tell you first because I think you’d deserve to know. I’ll be telling everyone else shortly”

He can hear the words coming out of her mouth. He watches her lips form the syllables, but he refuses to believe a word he’s hearing.

“Leave?” He grabs her wrist and tries to pull her back. “You can’t just leave.” He’s better than the past. If it were before the recovery of the lions he’d be cursing her name to filth. He wouldn’t be trying to stop her, just trying to burn the bridge between them.

With a growl she responds, “yes I can Keith.” She tears her arm away from his grasp.  She’s gotten stronger since they’ve left Earth, or she’s grown accustomed to his go to maneuvers. Shiro has warned him of having a predictable style in the past.

“We’re a team,” and he hopes she just gets upset with the conversation and refuses to carry it any further because if she asks if the “we” are them plus the other three paladins or if the “we” is actually “them” he’s going to be screwed. Like stumble over his feelings until he’s red in the face screwed.

“Keith, I don’ want to…Don’t think….” She breathes out harshly and tries again for a third time. “I just didn’t think I’d have to explain myself to you of all people.” He can swear that he sees the glassy shine of small teardrops in the corner of her eyes.

“You don’t Pidge,” he says. Now it’s his turn to gather his thoughts. He closes his eyes and clenches and unclenches his fists a few times. “I understand how you feel. The creepy crawly feeling on your skin that just pops up out of nowhere. That feeling that you could and should be doing more so why aren’t you? Nobody ever talks about how weird it is to go from survival mode to just like….”

“Living?” She supplies.

“Yeah,” he responds. “You’re putting the lives of few above the lives of many,” and it stings before he can even finish the sentence. If they’d recovered her brother or her dad and not Shiro, he very well may be contemplating the same thing at this very instant.

“I don’t know if being altruistic is going to help me accomplish my goals. And I don’t know if the resources here are enough to justify staying.”

“That’s all we are to you? Potential resources?” He can feel his voice rise with each syllable to an ugly combination of anger and sadness.

She shifts her gaze to lock eyes with him. “Keith, you don’t want me to answer that question.”

“I think I do.”

“You don’t need me to. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t spend time together anymore. We don’t touch each other anymore. It seems pretty obvious that our interactions were need driven. Here we don’t have to dance around the Garrison, we have all of our immediate needs met, we have a vague idea of what we’re doing and don’t have to cobble together shards of evidence. Take away all the urgency and desperation…”She waves her hand in between them. “There’s not much left.”

* * *

Not. _Shink_. That. _Shink_. Much. _Shink_. Left? _Shink._  He sharpens against his whetstone and fumes. There are times when he’s angry and he can push it back, and let reason take over. He can abate whatever dark feelings are there and see things without blinders. There are times when he’s angry and he can harness it. He can kick ass, or make bombs. And then there are times where he’s so upset he can’t see straight, let alone actually do something about his rage.

It’s so strange when this happens, because he’s used to…dependent upon channeling his emotions into something bigger and greater than human affect. He feels helpless when he can’t.

Now is one of those times. It’s hard to even keep his grip on the knife, let alone reality.

But it was appropriate wasn’t it? Lose Shiro. Gain Pidge. Find Shiro. Lose Pidge. He’s never had much, so having just one of them around at a time seemed like a goddamn miracle. It’s the reason he can’t do anything with his anger right now other than let it happen. It’s the reason he’s going to let her go with further protest.

“You’re up late.” A familiar voice pulls him from his thoughts. He’s greeted by the welcome sight of Shiro stepping into the observation deck. He has water with him and a towel wrapped around his neck. Maybe he’s not the only one with emotions that need dissipating.

“Can’t sleep,” He sheaths the knife and all but throws it to the side. He turns his gaze from the knife to the rounded dome to his left. From their current location they can see the dusky brown blue pillars of a stellar nursery. Maybe, in a few billion years these globules will form stars.

For now they just pulsate and look pretty. Innocuous as that is, even that is enough to make the veins in Keith’s forehead throb just a little more with unfocused rage.

“What’s up?”

Keith can feel velvety cushions beneath him dip as Shiro sits down. Before, having Shiro this close would make him feel like one of the wild hares he’d catch in simple traps across the desert. Afraid, and desperate to get out. Now?

It makes him feel something that is equal parts agony and equal parts relief. It’s good that he can do this with Shiro, and he’s so damn afraid it’s going to get ripped away from him again. Like maybe even having one person at a time is too much for a wretched person…augmented magic device…like him.

Shiro lets him drown in his own silence for a few agonizing minutes before pulling him out and slowly beginning the resuscitation process. Beause Shiro is Shiro, he has this down to a science. He could wring every last ugly truth out of him, but instead he uses his powers for good. Uses them only to wring out a little bit at a time. It leaves Keith drained and upset, but each time he’s a better person.

He’s about to get pulled through the goddamn wringer of personal growth.

Shiro begins to speak, his eyes deadlocked on the view outside of the ship. “Did something happen between you and Pidge? It seems like you’re both distant. It’s something my lion seems to think anyway.“  Right, because he doesn’t know the extent of what happened out in the desert.  “I think Pidge is good for you.” He gives an inch and takes a mile.

Maybe he’s given an inch and is taking the universe this time. It makes Keith’s face turn as red as his jacket and he turns his face away from the observation portal so that Shiro can’t see. Never mind the fact that he is sitting quite close, and can probably feel him shaking.

So, now it’s supposed to be his turn to talk. Where Pidge is adroitly skilled at ripping out a response from him, Shiro is great at making him look inward and actually reflect.

The other day in the hangar when he and Pidge were taunting each other he was agonizing over the thought of having to choose. Because, that’s what you’re supposed to do if you like two people right? It’s this disgusting drawn out process that makes everyone involved miserable.

Now he’s agonizing over losing Pidge not as a partner or as a friend, but as a regular everyday occurrence in his life.

He feels stupid for all the times he rode back across the desert to pick her up.

“Sorry,” Shiro shifts beside him. “I know that conversations like this make you uncomfortable. I’m probably not the person you’d like to have this conversation with. I’ll go if you’d like.”

“No,” Keith decides after a moment. “You can stay if you’d like.”

“Okay.’’ Shiro brushes his biological hand against Keith’s own. “Would this be alright?”

Keith loosely links their fingers together. “More than alright.” In an instant he and Shiro manage to pick back up almost at the exact same place they left off. It’s a gesture that’s meant to calm as much as it is meant to silently say that Shiro hasn’t forgotten.

Keith catches his bottom lip between his teeth and forces himself to clear his mind. Makes himself enjoy this, because it’s such a privilege.

* * *

In the end his extended agonizing over Pidge was premature, and he’d wasted precious energy on thinking she’d leave. Now instead of being mad at her about leaving, he was mad at her for not following through. Which, he knew was stupid because he was actually so damn glad she was staying.

So he just sort of existed in a state of distressed equilibrium for a few weeks. His glare could burn holes through her at breakfast, or he’d purposefully select anyone else to work with on missions.

He’d catch a glimpse of her when she was taking off her helmet. He’d watch with a dry mouth as her frizzy hair spilled out and over her eyes. Or he’d see her passed out on the sofa in the common area with her mouth wide open. She sounded like she could snore loud enough to rattle windows. But she’d shift, and her sleep shirt would ride high and he’d catch sight of white skin flecked with freckles, and everything about her would seem slightly less gross. The crust in the corners of her eyes didn’t matter, the fact that she probably hasn’t showered in days doesn’t matter either. He wants her.

The sigil on his hand burned “restraint, restraint, restraint,” and wasn’t that what he was doing?

Maybe not because he couldn’t dedicate all of his energy at keeping his desire for her at bay. There was Shiro to deal with too.

Shiro left the door to his room open often. He wanted to be available to the team, and Shiro was just so sociable he probably liked the unannounced company.

Keith always came with a question to break the ice. He didn’t _need_ a reason see Shiro. He knew that, but it’s nice to have one. So today he wanted to ask a question about Galra language. He was trying to learn something other than the cryptic and limited Druid symbols that he’d learned in his childhood, and Shiro made it no secret that he’d become quite fluent in the past year.

“Shiro?” he pokes his head into the door frame, but doesn’t see the other paladin right away.

“In here.” Shiro calls from within the room.

Keith takes a few more steps into the bedroom, and then he sees something that makes him want to dart. The door to Shiro’s bathroom is open. He’s standing in all of his shirtless glory at the sink and he’s shaving.

It’s enough to make his jaw go slack and his pants get a little tighter.

“To what do I owe the pleasure Keith?”

When they first met, it pissed Keith off when he said stuff like this, because when most people said that kind of thing they were insincere. Then, it annoyed him even more later on to learn that Shiro was being sincere. Now? It’s charming and makes him want to go gush to Pidge about it like a school girl.

“Um,” Why was he here again? “I wanted to-“ He watches Shiro shave a long stripe from the tip of his chin to the base of his neck. He watches him repeat the movement over and over again until the last of the shaving cream on his face is wiped away.

In an attempt to get back on track he swallows painfully. “Ask your opinion about-“ Wow, Galra language? That sounds so dumb now. “Why you’re so stupidly hot.” And even though he can feel his brain flashing “STOP” in front of his eyes the whole time he finishes the awkward sentence while Shiro’s rinsing off his face and wiping it clean with a crisp white towel.

Correction. Asking about Galra language was actually the way better option now. “Is that the alarm? I think the alarm’s going off. I’m getting my armor on because the alarm’s going off and I need to save the universe.” And he darts before Shiro tries to enact the magical Shiro fix-it technique, because nothing can fix this clusterfuck.

Shiro turns and speaks to an empty room, “You could’ve stayed.”

Back in his room, Keith feels like he’s just been put through Garrison boot camp all over again. He’s panting and every muscle in his body is screaming at him to stop, even though he hasn’t done anything.  Even though he and Pidge have hardly spoken since she tried to leave, it still felt like he needed to give her closure. 

But he didn’t _want_ to give her closure, because he still wanted her.

And _none_ of that was exactly fair to Shiro was it?

And stringing along two people for whom he cared about deeply didn’t really show any modicum of restraint did it?

* * *

“Are you sure you’re fine with it?”

“I’m fine if you’re fine with it,” Pidge responds without so much as looking up from the serpentine coil of cables and cords on her workbench.

“It’s just kind of a strange arrangement for your first relationship.”

“Yeah,” She rolls her eyes. “My first professional job is defending the universe.” She begins counting on her fingers. “My first car is a giant lion.” She counts to there on her index finger, “And my first time “abroad” isn’t to another country or anything like that, it’s to another galaxy.” She drops the wrench and holds up her hands out in mock frustration. “But telling my…your…our…Keith…It’s okay to both insult the living hell out of us and cuddle both of us is the weird part.”

“When you put it that way-“

“I’ll start feeling concerned when he asks to add Lance in as an addendum.”

“You don’t really think.”

“I think Keith has fallen for both close friends he’s made so far.” She stares him down and waits for the discomfort to creep over him. It’s a classic technique she’s learned from none other than Keith himself.

 He’s useful.

She’ll never tell him that.

“Honestly, I can’t wait.”

Shiro shoots her a questioning look in response.

Triumphantly she rips apart a pair of joined chords and sets them aside into the “untangled” pile. “He’s going to be pissed off for like 90 minutes because we were talking about him behind his back or something.” She actively stops untangling for a moment to make a few jabs at her wristwatch. She sets the timer for ninety minutes exactly. “Then if this even remotely work out it will go totally fine for like three…maybe four months. Then the fun part will really begin.”

She raises her eyebrow and shoots Shiro a look. A look that she can only describe as being blatantly stolen from Lance when he’s trying to work a night move on someone that’s not interested. “After like three or four months, he’s gonna get really upset again and start agonizing on who he wants to lose his virginity to.”

Pidge watches as Shiro’s eyebrows threaten to take up permanent residence in his hairline. Seriously, how can a guy who has seen the kind of stuff he has still be so…pure?

“Well, we’ll just deal with this for the time being.”

“He’s gonna have a heart attack Shiro.” She adds after a short pause. “It’s going to be so fun.”

* * *

None of them are strangers to curling up next to an observation port and just existing for awhile. It’s an amazing way to realize how small and insignificant they all are while simultaneously being struck by the universe’s beauty. So it’s no surprise when they find him curled up at the ship’s most isolated observation bay. It’s in the bottom level, starboard end.

And Pidge can tell that he’s spooked about their arrival right away. As soon as the automatic doors let them in his eyes are on them. And they go wide when he realizes that both of them are here. Together.

So she has to act fast.

So she darts. Well…moves fast enough to move onto his left side, closest to the window so that Shiro can sit on his right. But she can’t do a proper dart, because if she does, she risks Keith having one of those knee jerk visceral responses. There’s a time and a place for a tuck, roll, and knife pull.

So she and Shiro settle on either side of him, but don’t exactly say anything for a moment. They hadn’t expected the plan to get this far, and expected Keith to get a bit too weirded out before they could continue. As it stands, he’s sitting stock still.

“Me and Shiro are breaking up with you,” she says in a deadpan tone. She knows its absolutely cruel, but she can’t help herself. It’s what he’s expecting after all. It’s more to get a reaction out of Shio than anything. “Both of us, together, at once.”

“Pidge!” and yeah, she’s never heard Shiro be this scandalized before. It’s great, and if Keith lives past the next five minutes of dialogue he’ll pay her back in triplicate.

But that’s a big if right now. His complexion has gone white as a ghost and his eyes are blown wide.

“I’m kidding I’m kidding,” she corrects with a tinge of fear in her voice. Because if they have successfully cornered Keith, who knows when they will both have this opportunity again.

“What the fuck then?”

She wants to derail the conversation further and tell him how goddamn eloquent that is. That he’s everything she’s ever dreamed of, but only because of his verbal communication ability. But she doesn’t because Shiro looks like he wants to kill her via guilt trip right now.

“Pidge is um…aware of our situation before the mission,” Shiro begins.

“And Shiro is aware of our situation after the mission,” Pidge continues. “No thanks to you making me cry the other day when-“

“Pidge,” Shiro cuts her off because yeah, she was acting off script. And yeah, they had agreed to save that particular outburst for another discussion at another time.

“We want to save you a few more days, or weeks, or months, or whatever time frame you’re on of agonizing. If you want you can keep doing whatever with both of us.”

“We’ve talked it over and we think it’s the best option given our circumstances,” Shiro supplies. “If you’re okay with it that is.”

Pidge watches his fists clench and unclench against his jeans. His gaze is still dead center forward. He refuses to meet either of their gazes.

“Oh, but it you know be limited. You and me. You and Shiro…Shiro’s great and all, but he’s not into girls.”

“And we can end it any time, if it gets weird,” Shiro supplies.

And they’re both just talking now, filling in space and waiting for Keith to respond. Because if he doesn’t go along with it one of them is going to be crushed. Neither of them wants to see that because, quite frankly she and Shiro get along great.

“It can be that easy?” Keith finally asks.

“Yeah,” she says after a long pregnant pause. “I think so.” She leans back to look past his back and at Shiro directly. “What do you think Shiro?

“I think so too.”

* * *

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I won,” Pidge says with a huge grin as Keith attacks her neck. It’s not a euphemism found in one of Lance’s comics. No, he’s attacking with something that’s a combination of a bite and a kiss, and if there are marks she’s going to kiss his ass.

“You didn’t _win_ anything Pidge,” he says against her neck. “Except maybe…You know…This.”

“Oh my god!” She makes sure to make it sound even more exaggerated than the first time. “You sound like Lance now. He’s such a bad influence I swear.”

He pulls away from her neck. “I do not.”

“You so do though,” she says as she props her head up on one of his numerous pillows. It’s a miracle. Every night he tosses and turns and throws them off the bed into a huge pile, and by the afternoon the castle’s magic has placed them back in a neat pile on top.

“Well, come on. Let’s get to it.” She slithers out of her shirt without so much as lifting herself off the bed. “I have to collect a hefty three GAC bet from Shiro after this.”

“Never mind,” he says with a smirk. “I’ve changed my mind,” he says as he shucks his shirt in response.

“Uh, huh” she says absentmindedly as she drinks him in.


End file.
